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.

Huck Finn's Advice to Teachers

Whether from nature or nurture, I've always been troubled by a noisy, nagging conscience. It always prods me to do what is deemed the right thing and gives me seemingly everlasting hell when I refuse to do so.

I also seem to be genetically predisposed to please people.

I also have a burning desire to win. For me, a second-place winner really is a first-place loser.

I was also brought up to believe "the boss is always right." In fact, I remember being reminded of that when, at about 10 years old, I was sent out the door to work in tobacco fields.

I was brought up in the non-unionized South that felt secure in the presence of stable hierarchies.

All of the above makes me easy to exploit. I can be made to work harder than the rest without financial reward.

It gets worse. All of this is reinforced by the fact that my current job site took me in, some 15 years ago, like a hungry orphan off the streets and made me feel at home immediately and was quick to express appreciation and gratitude for my work, something I'd been craving for years.

In short, even though I am a child of the turbulent '60s, almost everything about me prefers compliance, placation, a life free of uncomfortable confrontations.

So think of the volatile cocktail that results when you mix the above with an externally imposed system, of dubious pedagogical value, that claims to measures teachers' value through number crunching and and relentless monitoring of their planning, goals, objectives, execution in the classroom, their assessment of these things, and the final outcomes as measured by test scores, also of dubious value.

On top of that, the system claims to reward those who are "highly effective" (according to the system's standards), and to refuse to reward a less effective batch and to punish yet another.

 And on top of that, the system is also imposed on each school's administrators, making it difficult for teachers to find or reach the appropriate targets of the metaphorical rocks they ache to throw.

In short, it is a system so vile, insidious and manipulative it makes me want to use the word "evil."

So all of this is falling upon teachers like me (I assume my feelings and my character are not unique) who love to teach, who long to do the right thing, who like to win, who hate to disappoint, who desperately need a raise and who have a conscience.

Are we damned if we follow our conscience or damned if we don't or are we damned either way?

I wonder if I have two consciences: My conditioned conscience says that things handed down from high are always right; my innate or born-with conscience insists I listen to my heart, that I trust it and stand up for it even when risk is involved.

My conditioned conscience tells me not to be a rabble-rouser or a resister and to go back to grading those vocab tests my students took Friday; my innate conscience tells me it is being violated, that there is poison in the air. It tells me either to take action or shut up and do what they tell me.

For decades, I've been waking up every workday morning believing that I'm doing the right thing with my life, that I'm making a difference in the lives of a handful of young people and I'm doing it in a way that depends largely on the gifts that I came into the world with, as opposed to systems imposed from on high.

Under Marzanoification, how can I turn that off now and wake up at an ungodly hour to put my Internal Teacher second or to stifle him or rename him or re-educate him? I can't learn to accept dreading my work.

I've been singing the song of teaching far too long for someone to hand me pre-fab, cookie-cutter musical notations, insist that I follow them and claim that my song will remain the same.

The dilemma I describe above -- the well-meaning do-gooder confronted with the need to engage in civil disobedience -- reminds me of a book people used to read called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The crisis point of the novel (not to give anything away) comes when Huck finally has to decide whether to turn in the slave Jim -- who has become his best friend -- or help him escape. His "conscience" speaks to him from all that he has heard about the justification of slavery and the evil of stealing. He knows that if people learn that he has helped Jim, he'll be an outcast, a no-good abolitionist. He believes that he will have stolen the slave from Miss Watson, Jim's "rightful owner," a woman who "never done [Huck] no harm." He is moved to do "the right thing" and writes Miss Watson a letter revealing Jim's whereabouts.

Upon thinking, then thinking again, however, and remembering Jim's goodness toward him, he tears up the note, saying "All right, then. I'll go to hell."

For Huck, the price of going with his heart is as harsh as his young mind can imagine. But Jim is worth it.

I think I can add my name to the long list of folks inspired by that fictional kid's courage. The time comes when we need to "go to hell" for the things we believe in. It's not personal -- we don't mean to hurt Miss Watson -- but it's a matter of principle. So we do it.

As for continuing to be exploited and for compromising my integrity for bogus points in this evaluation system, I'd like to quote another character from American lit, Melville's stubborn Bartleby the Scrivener:

"I would prefer not to."

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.

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.