Focus on What Matters

During the past year or so I've heard myself and my colleagues say, “This would be a terrible time to be a new teacher. Who could possibly want to teach under these conditions?” I've heard a surprising number of my students say, in effect, "I want to teach, and I don't have a safety-net profession, yet I hear my teachers talking about what a terrible time it is to do this for a living."

A brief inventory of “these conditions” that make this a "terrible time" would include the quickly approaching Common Core with its rash of new acronyms, even more focus on standardized test scores, inconsistent and often blatantly unfair methods of teacher evaluation, intrusive and bullying parents (not all of them, of course!), and embarrassingly low salaries. There are, in fact, many more reasons for glumness, but instead of cataloging every single evil that escaped Pandora’s Box, let’s cling to the gift that remained inside: Hope.

For as far back as I can remember, teachers in America have taught “in spite of,” but every generation thinks the newest obstacles confronting our beloved profession are the worst of all.

They probably are not. But even if they are, it doesn't matter. We teach the way we love: “in spite of.”

As the old myth-meister Joseph Campbell liked to remind us, the preferred space on the Wheel of Fortune is the hub, not the rim. The latter will have its ups and downs, now and forever, spinning through eternity, but the hub will find us at home with our bliss – to mix the metaphor, on an even keel. The hub represents why we do what we do, not the outcomes, nor the distractions imposed from without, nor the ever-changing hoops through which we are invited to leap.

So, young person, if you want to teach, cling to the hub!That is your hope, that thing deep down inside you that called you to teach “in spite of” in the first place. And old teachers -- it wouldn't kill you to do this as well.

In the days leading up to walking through the doors that lead into the lion’s den, i.e., your classroom, reflect often on what led you to this point. Then hunker down on the hub. Common Core and all the rest will in time roll past you on the rim. You'll learn shortly that this profession offers pleasures and rewards that far outweigh the bulky and ever-changing irritants that accompany it.

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.

Another Voice

Check out this gentleman's comments: http://ventingmycynicism.blogspot.com/2012/09/no-zero-policies-and-failure-of.html.

Zero Grade Policy? First Consider This

I'm sure you've heard that one of the new crazes here in Bedlam (i.e., public high schools) is a Zero Grade Policy.

Sounds like a good idea to me: Zero grades. No grades at all. I mean, really, what good are they? Who can show me a human life made happier, more fulfilling or more successful in any meaningful way by high grades in secondary school?

Wait, what? That's not what is meant by a Zero Grade Policy? It's about not giving zeroes to student work? That's different.

I predict that this new policy will find fertile ground in the barren minds of the people who impose education policy on educators. For them, there is good reason to implement such a policy: Someone wrote a book in which he claimed it was a good idea. He pointed to some research that showed it was a good idea. The policy imposers almost understood the book (so it must've been good) and the author's use of research seemed to be valid (so it must've been).Then some school districts adopted the plan. Therefore, other school districts should fall in line and adopt it as well. That way, we'll all have that plan and that will be good.

Good God!

But while we wait and resist in the gentle and civil manner of teachers who tended to be the good, authority-pleasing kids in their school days, we should busy ourselves with asking some rudimentary questions about graded assignments.

Why do we assign work to be graded? How many graded tasks do we assign in, say, a quarter? Why do we assign that many? Would students learn just as much if we assigned fewer? Would we be better teachers if we didn't spend our weekends, especially the ones with blue skies, grading work that students didn't want to do and which 90% of them only took a cursory jab at?

Why do some students not turn in some or all of those assignments? Would we turn in those assignments if we were students?

As for the number of grades we "need" to have: The college classes in which I learned the most, the ones that inspired me to try to become an authority in some field or other, to become a guide through the Halls of Knowledge, in these classes I had exactly two grades: a midterm and a final. No safety nets, no gimmes, just two occasions during a quarter to demonstrate my newly gained expertise. I studied my butt off for those exams and I can quote that professor (Harry Morris) and the playwright he taught (some guy named Shakespeare) to this day.

I'm not saying this is how we should do it. I'm saying most of us are way overdoing it. In the process, we're inviting students to skip an assignment here or there or to perform half-heartedly on a few knowing they can make it up with 5 or 6 other quizzes. Also, we've created a system -- improved just a tad in the last 2 years -- where underachivers can goof most of the quarter, then apply themselves on a ludicrously weighted 9-weeks exam and come out looking pretty dang good.

Or do we have so many grades because parents think we should give their kids more opportunities to succeed, to prove they are B or A students? Is that what giving a lot of grades really does? No.

Is this not partly the reason even somewhat motivated students don't turn in work?

Another reason (I know this is hastily written, but I have a bunch of quizzes to get to) is that they aren't convinced it's worth their time to do it. If we're going to assign it and spend our precious weekends grading it, we have to sell it. We have to explicitly tell them why it isn't busy work and why it helps accomplish the goals of our class and why we think it's good for them.

And if it is busy work? Man! Are you out of your mind? Who has time to grade that stuff?!

So anyway. Once we all work through questions like the ones posed above, then we might be ready to consider overhauling a grading system and it might or might not include a Zero Grade Policy.

Progress Monitoring: Marzano and Scales

During an in-service on "scales" this afternoon, I soon became lost in a sea of jargon, giving me the opportunity to reflect on what this whole new rigmarole -- and this is just the beginning, we were told -- feels to a teacher of my advanced years.

My ruminations were intermittently interrupted, however, by the anguished cries of my beloved colleagues as they attempted to figure out what exactly the freak "scales" were and why we were having to learn about them.

Sitting in an uncomfortable chair and resting my elbow on a table stacked with the papers my colleagues and I would be dragging home with us afterwards, I had a terrible epiphany.

For the first time in my life, I was relieved to be old. I was grateful that I only had a little time left in a profession that is more and more being orchestrated and overseen by Nutcases United (NU). My gratitude, of course, was tempered by extraordinary sadness and anger at the hijacking of something I hold so dear.

Administrators do their best to calm our fears and dowse our anger by assuring us that this stiflingly disruptive evaluative system -- that seems to be growing tentacles of acronyms -- doesn't change the wonderful way we already teach, it's just a new round of terms to learn.

Nice try. I'm not being sarcastic when I say we appreciate your concern and we understand that you're pretty much as impotent as we are to slow the progress of this Juggernaut.

As the list of indicators grows and the drop-bys increase and the methods of monitoring, measuring, weighing and gauging proliferate, it all becomes more than an overlay of jargon. Let me try a little analogy:

People who have been driving for years eventually train their brains to do all the things required to keep them alive and moving on the road without bothering their conscious minds. We keep an eye on the car ahead of us, and the one ahead of it; we periodically scan the rear- and side-view mirrors; we check our speed limit; we constantly troubleshoot while also pondering elections, football, lesson plans, climate change and Mad Men.

But if we take on a backseat (or passenger seat) driver, someone eager to help us stay safe, we then have to add that person's list of concerns to ours. Our normal, unconscious flow is disrupted as we try to anticipate what our anxious passenger might be seeing. Now, even though we've done it for years, driving is no longer second nature, but strained and anxious.

That's what it's like to try to teach (which is like breathing for someone like me) and to mentally lug around a huge bag full of indicators that must be paid obeisance to. Also, as I have noted here previously, we must act as if there is no extra person in the room tapping away on an iPad. Our community is disrupted, our continuity is disrupted, our rapport is disrupted; the whole prospect of "teaching in the moment" becomes almost impossible while we try to satisfy the needs of the Dark Lord Marzano.

Even if the end product is a good class, it's a fake one on some level.

Okay. Occasionally at today's meeting I tuned back in just enough to get the crap scared out of me chiefly because since I was in about the 7th grade I've been horrible at putting together and sustaining an apparatus such as The Scale. I know this is something I'm just going to have to crib from my colleagues and then feel dirty about it later. Going along with extra stuff that I don't believe in always makes me feel dirty and compromised.

Now about those anguished cries of my beloved colleagues: It was good to hear them. I predict they're just getting warmed up. I work at a school with a terrific faculty, and I sense they have had it up to here with the extra work this crap is handing down to them and, more importantly, with the utter lack of trust it all implies.

Think about it: We have to just keep doing what they say and letting them watch. We have to change the way we talk to our kids. We have to let our kids see us doing things they know we have to do and maybe even watch us do things that go against our teaching philosophy. (I keep expecting one of them to ask, "Don't you have any integrity?") We have to change the way we grade them. We have to add fluff to our plans to meet new demands or try to cram what we already do into newly framed categories. All of this because we can't be trusted to do what we do. All of this because our own profession is not considered safe in our hands.

This all has to stop. Teachers are at the bottom of the food chain, at the bottom of a hole. Someone up on the surface keeps throwing trash on top of us. The people between us and the trash-throwers, people like principals, school board members, and superintendents all seem powerless to stop any of it. While this stuff is falling all around our ears, they keep shrugging and apologizing. They keep saying, "More is coming. This is the direction we're headed so we better get ready for it."

We have become, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, "listless playthings of enormous forces" beyond our control.

I don't believe in those things. It is people, not forces doing this to us, and they have to stop. Someone has to step up. We have to turn this profession back into something we're not embarrassed to be associated with, something that won't chase our young colleagues away so quickly, something we can once more recommend to our kids as an honorable and rewarding way to spend their adult years.

"Welcome! Now start learning."

Here it is the first day, and the bus ramp and the grounds and the halls are alive again with the roar of teenagers. Just walking through that mob is a surreal experience. In these confined quarters, beginning, for many of us, in predawn darkness, the American Salad is tossed, the Melting Pot stews and simmers, assaulting the nostrils with a cocktail redolent of body spray, perfume, aftershave, bubblegum, with the occasional trace of cigarette (?) smoke; add to that the cacophony of croaking male adolescent voices in various dialects, the delightful squeals of young girls racing to hug someone else they’re happy to see, the squeals modulating into hushed sibilance as they share some sacred secret with a sophomore, the casual and constant airing out of four-lettered obscenities so foul they would bring a blush to a drill sergeant’s face.

They pour through the gates and flood through the halls, some of them quickly transforming their lockers into makeshift make-up counters and make-out stations. Then a bell or a horn or a chirp or a tone will sound, and a cluster of them will break off from the larger pack and make their way to, of all places, your room.

So Happy New Year, everyone! They’re here! What to do now?

You need to be welcoming and not openly territorial, even though they are certainly invading your space. These young humans are giving you a chance to do what you love, so thank God they’re here (at the end of class, I always try to remember to thank them for coming to high school, and I think I’ve found just the right blend of sincerity and corniness to express such a sentiment). At the same time, they’re entering your home away from home, so it’s right that you should have guidelines about their behavior there: They’re transients; you’ll be there all day. “It’s great to have you here today. This is where I work, so don’t spit on the floor.”

Hospitality is vital. The kids are shuffled around all day and most of them are filled with fears and insecurities. In your class, they should feel at home, accepted, appreciated. It should be a little refuge from the rest of the day. Don’t add to their anxiety. For the 50+ minutes you have them, they’ll be liked and listened to. They still have to work and learn, but it will be with someone who cares about them and cares enough about their learning that she’s willing to expend the energy to make it lively and interactive.

But, especially if you look about their age, your hospitality needs to be tempered with authority. Because you’re young, students will want to like you AND take advantage of you. This requires a precarious balancing act. You can’t not be young until you get older and you certainly shouldn’t stifle your youthful enthusiasm, a little death that will happen in its own time.

It will be your job to show them that you can be cheerful, energetic, cool, humorous – all of that – and still be drop-dead serious about teaching them. It may help to think of it this way: You really like your students (this is an assumption on my part, but if I’m wrong, and you don’t, pick another profession now) and you want to help them become better educated, to have all the options that come with a better education. If even one of them thinks you’re his buddy and he can joke around with you in class and say things he wouldn’t dare say in his other classes, the rest of the class will be distracted and not become better educated.

This is where you have to step up and say something to the effect that while it’s okay to have a good time while we learn, we must all respect the process. You’re coming to the defense of all the kids in your class who are looking to you to teach them. You cannot let them down at the expense of those who think your class is the perfect time to take an hour off and goof around. With this approach, you’re not being mean to the smart aleck, you’re being protective of the other 24 young humans in the class.

Let’s face it: This balancing act may take a little time to work out. Don’t give up and quit during the first week. Let the process run its course. Give the sap time to rise up the tree (if, in fact, that’s what sap does).

During my first year of high-school teaching (after 15 years at a private liberal-arts college), I had plenty of trouble in this area, and it wasn’t because I looked young. As a professor, I seldom had to restore order in the classroom. In fact, if students ever really pissed me off, I could (and did) say something blunt and profane and just walk out on them. They’d be much better the next day. The Dramatic Walkout, however, is not an option for a high-school teacher. So sometimes, especially by sixth period, my high-school kids would just really get out of hand. I’d put out a fire on one side of the room only to notice another one had ignited on the other side – and you can guess what would happen while I was putting that one out.

By the last few minutes of class, I’d pretty much give up and go stand in front of the door to prevent early escapeage and, oddly, chat with the rambunctious little bastages, because, after all, they really did like me. One of them, Jessica, a quiet little mother hen who liked to help all her friends solve their problems, said, “Your problem is that you try to be a nice guy, and that’s not going to work here.” That stung. But a whole bunch of 17-year-olds were crowded around us near the door and they all shut up long enough to wait for my answer. I tried this one: “I’m not trying to be a nice guy, I am a nice guy. And if I can’t teach here while being a nice guy, I’ll go find something else to do.” Okay, that was the voice of desperation and stubbornness speaking, but we all heard me say it and somehow things began to change. They had to learn to adapt to my niceness; I had to learn when to explode long enough to protect the Jessicas in my class.

I’ll be back very shortly with more reflections on and advice for the first days of class.

Why Teachers Hate Texting

Good ol' August: the time when teachers start touching up their syllabuses and students begin their summer reading.

Certainly every school district by now has a policy prohibiting the use of cell phones during class, so of course that'll show up on your syllabus along with the penalty for violating the policy.

You'll probably see their eyes glaze over when you bring it up in class. They already know what's allowed and what isn't, and the ones who are going to do it anyway are more concerned about how to get away with it than what the punishment will be should they get caught.

So my plan is to focus more on justifying the policy than threatening them with the consequences. Maybe teenagers in the 21st century aren't sure why it's such a big deal. I mean, come on. They text like other generations breathe.

The following is my effort to explain texting's lethal effect on a learning environment. My students will get a copy of this and I'm putting it on Blackboard for back-up. If you like it, feel free to use some or all of it. Or you could send me yours. Either way, feel free to post comments.

The Texting Problem:

You Must Be Present to Win

For centuries now, classrooms have had four walls, not just out of an architectural necessity, but to provide a separate space for the world of the mind. Those walls remind us that we are taking a brief sabbatical from that world racing away outside the classroom window while we, in our little refuge, ponder the meaning of things, try to make sense of the world and perhaps figure out our place in it.

Texting, on the other hand, breaks down those walls, and the world and its worries come tumbling into our once sacred space.

The best classes are those in which you are so engaged in the material that you lose all sense of time and are startled to notice that class is over.

This feeling – often called the flow state -- is only possible through focus, concentration and participation, none of which is possible while texting.

While the classroom walls are intact, students often find themselves engaged in intellectual, stimulating, thought-provoking and sometimes unsettling conversations that are extremely rare in the outside world. As a teacher, these highly charged conversations, in which I become little more than a bystander or moderator, are my favorite classes. In these, we share our ideas, watch them change and grow, and listen to other sides of issues, to different interpretations and different ways of looking at things. We watch a first-draft whim evolve, through conversation, into a full-fledged idea.

Because texting takes us rudely out of this conversation and into another, it can thoroughly disrupt this powerful way of learning.

My best classes develop a strong sense of community. While we may not all love each other, we adapt; we learn tolerance and respect; we accept that while we might not all like the same books or music, we all have legitimate contributions to make to this team or family or community that has gradually developed in Building 8, Room 226.

But if you’re texting, you are emotionally and intellectually absent from this community and you’re treating  it (i.e., the rest of us) as mere afterthoughts and annoyances. That behavior is rude, disruptive, disrespectful – in a word, unacceptable.

A class, at its best, could be considered a gift or a communal meal. Everyone is given the opportunity to think, listen, share, learn, give and receive; everyone is invited to leave the room a slightly different human than the one who entered it less than an hour ago.

But this simply cannot happen if you’re texting. You should not try to be in two places at once. You have to stay here. You must be present to win.