I Herd That

Back when I was a high-school teacher, I always sort of enjoyed the first day or so of Pre-Plan (a label that makes no sense, now that I think about it) or Plan Week, or whatever it was called, except for the meetings, of course.

On most years we got new “spirit shirts,” meaning shirts with the name of our high school on it, and usually adorned with a sort of modernist, wind-blown lion, a lion that looked to be a close relative of the Denver Broncos logo. Because teachers are a mostly monastic bunch, ascetics by necessity, this was sort of like a birthday or some other gift-giving occasion. Yay! A free shirt!

We typically didn’t have those on the first morning back when we sat for our yearbook photos, so some of us wore an older spirit shirt, others dressed up a bit, others would wear just what they’d wear to work. We wore whatever someone like us would wear. No big deal.  

In my last year of teaching, things changed. Yearbook photos got pushed back a day or so. This gave us time to get our new shirts first, which, sadly, were a garish, road-worker, prison-inmate orange. The administrative team received slightly nicer, but still orange shirts, as a reminder that they were administrators and a part of their own team. The varsity, I guess, and we the teachers would be the junior varsity.

We’re used to that!

And we were required to wear those things for our yearbook pictures. Required? I was so stunned when I heard this, I raced home, unlocked my Home Security Box, and thumbed through my vital documents until I found my 1973 honorable discharge from the United States Air Force.

Having dutifully completed my military obligation, I realized higher-ups no longer got to tell me what shirt to wear. So I put the shirt in a drawer where I couldn’t see it and skipped out on the yearbook photo.

Also, we were supposed to put on some black pants with our orange shirt for our Entire Faculty and Staff Photo (EFSP). Because I was required to, I didn’t do that either. Also, I don’t have any black pants.

Later, those of us who “missed” the first round of photos were told we could get our pictures taken when our students went in for re-takes. But, we would not be photographed unless we wore our orange shirt.

(Back home for another look at the discharge papers. Yep. Still not in the Air Force, thank God.)

Seriously?! If any of us, including your beloved author, had possessed the kind of courage that is often likened to certain male organs, we would’ve walked over with our students and caused a scene. We would’ve said, “Hey, I’m here to get my picture taken for the yearbook and I insist you take it. Either take my picture or call over whoever’s enforcing this thing, and we’ll have a discussion about what’s important.”

And our students would have looked on with envy and admiration, and they would’ve learned there is a time to resist trivial, meaningless orders, something we likened to poultry droppings back in the Air Force days. No one at my high school was going to fire us for doing that or even make us do 50 push-ups or clean an entire john with a toothbrush.

What poultry droppings we all were! How I regret it! Missed teaching moment!

Now to be fair to those who required the shirts, there was method in their rigidity. They wanted it to be a show of teamwork, and maybe even family, even though many families don’t require all their kids to wear the same clothes to show they’re part of the family.

So I gave serious (for me) thought to the teamwork concept. Who would benefit from our being a team? And does doing what you’re told when it’s a violation of your freedom – not so much as an American, but as a grownup – make you a team? Does conformity equal teamwork?

And what would you call a team of grownups who have next to no say in changes in policy, what text(s) they use and how, how many students they have in a class, how to discourage students from taking advantage of soft make-up policies, how they actually teach in their own classrooms – the poor folks’ last refuge of autonomy – and how and by whom they are evaluated, how often they are yanked out of class for something with the faintly obscene name of “pull-outs,” so that continuity, coherence and rapport are all damaged?

And what do you call a team of grownups who have survived off piddling, pathetic pay raises over the last seven years and who have had a good portion of their retirement pension plundered by politicians?

What possible difference does it make that all of these well-meaning, hard-working grownups, drawing menial wages while they do their damnedest to educate Florida’s youth, i.e., protect them from the wildly incompetent shenanigans of the feckless boneheads who’ve forever tarnished the Muskogean word “tallahassee” – what difference does it make if they all form a team wearing orange shirts?

I hate to think that that kind of team is just meant to placidly go along with every outrageous directive that gets channeled through in-services and department meetings. “Where’s your spirit? This is a team! We’re family here!” That, my friends is an ad populum fallacy, and every student who’s sat through my AP Lang classes would recognize it as such. There’s another term for it, and it has to do with bovine droppings.

Speaking of bovines, this particular team incident brings to mind the days of my youth, milling about in my granddad’s cow pasture. There were about 50 Black Angus out there, all, so to speak, wearing the same black shirt and pants. They were a team.

One of them, a female, would decide to be the Head Cow, and the rest of the bunch would be all “Whatever. But you don’t to get wear different clothes.” The Head Cow’s main job – I swear she was working for The Man – was to make a cow path. She would walk up to the water trough or under the shade of a pecan tree or over to the next pasture, and the rest would follow exactly in her footsteps.

Soon, there would be a narrow dirt path winding through the grass, weaving and winding as if the herd had elected a tipsy leader.

So when it came time for them to be hauled off to you-know-where, she led them to the chute and they followed.

So as a little kid, I learned what “herd mentality” meant, and for me it wasn’t a metaphor. And I learned that being a team with no power doesn’t help anybody, even if it has a leader.

At my school, it was just another freaking distraction to prod frustrated, financially vulnerable grownups to tough it out for another year.

In Which I Apologize to Marzano

This is embarrassing. Over the years I've referred to Marzano as "the Dark Lord," and I've coined terms such as Marzanopolooza and Marzonify and Marzanopoly. I've just pummeled the poor guy.

My bad!

As the attached video will confirm, all the things I've complained about were not his idea. Not only that, he strongly opposes the way many school districts use his baggy list of indicators and domains and such. You watch the video and see for yourself.

Anyway, my school district has renamed its evaluation process so Marzano is no longer in the bull's eye, but the Big Marz's name shows up on the bottom of all the handouts next to that little copyright symbol.

"This isn't about Marzano. This is something else because it has a different name. Do NOT look at the person behind the curtain! Crap! Toto! Get away from me!"

It's still used to give teachers scripts to memorize and even blocking, as they say in theatre: "The teacher will now move toward the board and point out. . . . " "At this time the teacher will form groups. . . . "

It's still an anxiety-causing form of evaluation for the poor younger faculty and just something else to keep up with for the older ones.

We'll talk about this more later. Those of you who are neither teachers nor students in the public education system will think I'm writing science fiction or hyperbolic satire. Not so.

But now, listen to Marzano. I never thought I'd be saying that.

How to teach effectively in an overcrowded classroom

Well, darn it. I was not planning any future posts this year -- or, quite possibly, in the years to come -- because I felt I had already told the world everything there is to know about teaching. What else could I say?

With the dawn of the 2014-2015 academic year, however, a new topic has surfaced. Many of my colleagues in the Seminole County Public School system, due to an unwonted spike in enrollment, find their classes overflowing with students. Many of them have over 30 young scholars in a class -- and that includes courses for "standard" kids, AP kids and kids required to do labs.

So, as you can imagine, after being stunned by Class-List Shock (CLS), many young teachers have flocked to me in the halls of my beloved school, on the streets of my beloved town, and in this little community's many fine mom-and-pop coffee shops and just bombarded me with questions.

Here are some of them:

Where do I put all the new desks being brought into my room? How do I arrange them in order to achieve feng shui, instilling my young charges with energy and inspiration to learn in densely crowded spaces? How do I leave enough room for students and teacher to walk between the rows?

How can I make it more difficult for the few dishonest students to cheat? How can I keep texters from hiding amongst a huddle of their classmates? How easy will it be to find that one, reclusive, lost student who needs a little more individual attention to find her groove?

How can I memorize their names in a timely fashion? How much instruction time will I lose while I'm trying to actually get to know my many students so they don't look like so many identical (but identity-less) faces one sees packed into massive corporate work spaces?

Where will I find the courage or faith to assign anything to that many students, knowing I'll have to grade that assignment? How will I get even the simplest quiz back in a timely fashion? How will I give essays the attention they deserve when I have roughly 30 students in a class? When am I supposed to mow my lawn or walk my dog or speak to my wife and/or kids or have a social life? How will spending most of my weekends grading affect my existence -- socially, emotionally, spiritually, physically?

How much will my pay increase due to this new influx of students? And if I do get a pay increase, will the extra money make this situation any better? Or will there still be too many students?

How will I do effective group work? Will the groups need to be larger, and therefore no longer really groups, but mini-classes, offering the unmotivated or easily distracted students a chance to coast? Or will the groups be smaller, so there will be so many of them they can't all give meaningful input?

Have pedagogical gurus such as Marzano and Kagan written helpful books explaining how to remain a domain-savvy, effective and responsive teacher when there are just too many students?

For AP teachers, will the nice people at College Board be informed of our overpopulated classes so they can adjust their grading accordingly? Will pass rates be prorated for teachers who have 25 or more students in a class or who have a total of over 150?

For the rest, will special consideration be given by our multi-layered, slippery, protean evaluation system, e.g., "Some of your test scores were a little low, but you had a truckload of students, so we're gonna let that go."

Is it okay to complain about this and if so, to whom do I complain? Who is responsible for this mess? Who tipped the first domino that resulted in this avalanche? Where would I start to find who is to blame? Should I just work my way up the high-school echelon, starting with colleagues, administrators, SCPS supervisor-type people, school board members, superintendent? And who will listen to me, one high-school teacher, with just one stinking little vote?

Will the candidates now seeking election to the school board do anything to keep this from happening again? Will they come forward and promise to do so in good faith?

Why was the cutoff for the maximum number of students per teacher set at 150 for so long? Had someone done research to show that 150 is the maximum number of fellow human beings one can establish any sort of relationship with (except on Facebook, of course, where our friends can soar into the thousands!)? Is 172 students too many for a writing teacher (to take just one example at random)?

What form of Machiavellian mathematics was used in which 172 students could indicate compliance with even the most far-fetched class-size restrictions? Is allowing a teacher to have that many students an example of adhering to the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit? When a teacher is given too much to do, does this show faith in the teacher or just a lack of concern for her?

Since there are no strong arguments that very large classes increase student learning and raise faculty morale, is it okay for me to object to this practice? Or will it make me seem like a selfish, whiny malcontent trying to foist my workload onto my colleagues?

If my school as a whole values its students as people and learners, and if overloaded classes make them more likely to be unattended to as both people and learners, and if I object on the students' behalf, am I going against my high school or simply reminding it that we are one body, and our students are the most important part of that body, and to cry out against their mistreatment is to plead for a stronger, more sensible body? Can a person object to error or folly in the person's country or school and still love that country or school?

Or is it better just to be a good sport and do the best we can with this rough hand we've been dealt in order to maintain a more civil esprit de corps? Should we all just lay low and take our medicine, with the confidence that this loathsome burden will blow over like, for example, the 7-period day?

Wow, that was a lot of good questions! Thanks to all of you who asked them. Sadly, answering any of them is beyond my simple powers, but I'd like to welcome this blog's many readers to provide some solutions, if possible.