Gate vs. Thread

I'm among the 75% or so of teachers who has been threatened with a lawsuit. When it happens, it's devastating. Usually the threat is empty, or it's baseless. And I've found that people often argue the most intensely when they know their position is indefensible. Yet it happens a lot in this profession.

Teachers spend large amounts of time in front of students with no immediate supervision. In those times with students, it's easy to say something that will offend. When tired, it's easy to forget exercising good judgment when sharing details or perspectives with students. And sometimes youth becomes so shrill and obnoxious a teacher can be tempted to lose his or her temper. There are so many opportunities to make a mistake.

Then one thinks about the quirky matters that can trip up a whole career: leaving a sharp tool out where someone can use it, not properly accounting for the costs of a student or school activity, abusing copyright protections when copying materials for class, leaving a classroom to pick up a set of photocopies only to have something bad happen in one's absence.

But if I get to the interaction with students, students thrill to watch teachers flirt with "the edge" and it's tough to remember to be the professional. Students giggle when you say a bad word, or engage in double meaning. Students often want to talk about controversial issues that appear in the news. And though a teacher should never engage in bad-mouthing peers, students will seem to enjoy it when a teacher engages in it.

So I guess it's fair to say that we often hang by thread as teachers. We show up for work knowing that we have approximately 5 or 6 hours of time in front of a live audience where anything said or done can appear at the dinner table or become the subject of conversation at soccer practice.

However, when this job is done right, it resembles a downhill skier just barely missing the gates as he navigates his way down a slalom course. I remember being at a church where a preacher was able to do just that, and I would marvel at how close he would seem to come to words that broke the fifth wall of spiritual message, but then would turn back to the gospel right in time. It was something I marveled at. When we do our jobs well, kids can marvel at that as well.

Sometimes you have to wait to see how something plays out . . .

So a colleague told me today that some of her students were elated that they were starting my class later that day (our semesters switched). Many of them had me in 10th grade, and many knew me by association. What an awesome compliment. It's also a great vindication of an approach I took that year.

2008-09 might be my proudest teaching year. Something moved me to embark on a whimsical but positive approach that year. I had a mammoth section of AP students. I resolved that with them I would never use their first names, referring to them as Mr. and Ms. I resolved to never complain about their enormous class size. I also, for practical reasons, simplified my gradebook dramatically, only collecting nine, ten, or eleven major assignments a marking period.

Meanwhile, settled into a really positive groove with some standard sections that year. I remember even promising myself that I would pretend to like a set of boys whose jib struck me wrong (and I ended up liking them as a result). That was the class where a student paid me the ultimate history teacher compliment ("With you, the important things seemed important.")

So, now I receive some dividends from that year. I'm interested to see how this plays out with seniors and seeing if I can elevate them to something higher than just playing out the string.

Colleagues

A fantastic day recently reminded me of the wonderful colleagues I have. Great teachers, great people.

Few professions offer the richness of human contact as does this one. On my grumpiest days I need to remember how good it is to work in a profession like teaching where one is surrounded by so many talented, genuine people and where one gets so many chances to connect with them.

Free Knowledge

In its protest against SOPA Wikipedia shut down their site, offering visitors a line that I found truly obnoxious - "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge." An economist would quibble with the idea that the knowledge one gets is free. Someone worked to gather it, interpret it, write it. At the very least it cost someone time. Perhaps I wouldn't have been bothered as much had it said "Imagine a World Without the Free Exchange of Knowledge" but perhaps I am guilty of hair-splitting.

Wikipedia's attention-grabbing line, however, illustrates a challenge teachers have reaching and engaging the current generation of students. Information has always seemed free to the boys and girls in my class. Previous generations of students (including myself) had to labor more to get knowledge. Students today have always had Google which, of course, nearly always generates Wikipedia among the first hits for any topic researched. It seems like students grew up looking at finding answers as an eater views an all-you-can-eat buffet, while back before the 1990s we had to cook (even if early web applications offered us the researching equivalent of a microwave).

Okay, bad analogies.

Am I being too hard on Wikipedia's boast? Perhaps. After all, public libraries appear "free" to the public. For some reason I find their cause more noble than Wikipedia's, though it's easy to see the digitization of information, the free exchange of ideas, and the publication of ebooks might all seem as noble of efforts (in the long run) to elevate human understanding.

I fear that we're beginning to lose a grasp of the protocol that comes with writing good non-fiction accounts of what has been said or did. Historians and journalists follow a code by which they triangulate evidence and credit the sources of that information. Done well, the works of those professionals reliably contribute to our understanding. Done poorly or sloppily, even with good intentions, a lot of myth-making happens.

It is hard to move students toward an appreciation for creating something deliberately and purposefully than just posting it. And these students will someday be the teachers themselves.

If you had asked, I could have told you to expect this (January Edition)

This feels a bit like a Bill Engvall "Here's your sign" moment.

So, let's say we have a school that places one limitation after another on when teachers may and may not assign tests. Let's say this school has basically marked off the whole last week of the marking period as a maze of "no test on this day" dictums, and let's say that week is after a three-day weekend. Wonder what will happen . . .

. . . nearly every teacher assigns a whopping test on the Friday before that week. Yep, could've seen this one coming.

On a miserable day it's good to . . .

. . . do a re-cap of my favorite teaching moments:

Year 3: Taking students to see a classical music concert inspired by World War I

Year 4: Having students transcribe a Civil War soldiers' complete correspondence

Year 7: The culture I built with that legendary ninth grade class, a relationship so solid I could announce a topic to them and give them the choice how we covered it

Year 8: 1st period throws me a party when Sam was born

Year 10: turning around a student teacher and an honors class that lost their groove

Year 12: making a class of 34 in a section of AP U.S. actually work

Year 13: helping a colleague through an illness and seeing some of my kids rise to the moment by learning how to teach themselves

Year 14: Jazz Tuesdays

Children or Adults

So I have arrived at something of a dilemma. It's a good one, though.

My career was greatly influenced by an administrator at my first building. The man frustrated me at times. Yet he was a principled advocate for the students, and I could not have navigated some of my most frustrating relationships without keeping lessons from him in mind. This administrator had a purposeful habit of using the word "children" whenever he referred to our students. Never "kids." I remember one time that he remarked on the devastating power of thoughtlessness or mean-spiritness to our students: don't forget that we might be the last adult they every talk to. A bit macabre? Perhaps. But he came by it honestly.

Even teaching seniors the past six years, I've kept in mind that they are children. Someone's children. At times awkward children. Children who, with mixed results, are trying on the language and mannerisms of grown ups. Children.

In the past year, however, I've engaged in dialogue with my old choir director, and when I complimented her on how I was impressed at how she was a teacher of children more than a music director, she responded that she never thought of herself as a teacher of children, but a teacher of adults-in-training, and that treating her students like adults was what motivated her to do what she did.

Now that I'm entirely with upperclassmen and now that I'm wrestling with frustration at the demeaning attempt by my leaders to water down and make less rich the students' experience, I'm wondering if I need to shift to my choir directors' mindset.

I remember two years ago I taught a large (34 students) section of AP sophomores. As a gimmick to elevate the atmosphere of the class, I never used the students' first names, referring to them instead as Mr. or Ms. It was the best relationship I ever built with a class.

So, when semester two starts, marking the 2nd half of my juniors' high school odyssey, I think I'm making the switch to Mr. and Ms. It's time to deliberately show them that I am treating them as adults. But I'll be lying, because the whole time I know they're children, and that all I do for them must be guided by the conviction that they are children. I'm interested to see how the shift goes.

Today's Moment Worthy of Banging One's Head Against the Wall

So today I get an e-mail from one of my higher-ups containing details for the final exam of a course I don't teach. As part of the students' final exam they are to write an essay (about five paragraphs in length) responding to a prompt they have seen before. I'm stunned, however, as to the extent to which we have watered this task's challenge down. To wit:

• The students know of the prompt at the beginning of the course.
• The students are typically allowed a whole 90-minute block to write the essay.
• The students may use previously-prepared notes to write the essay.
• The students' notes may be in the form of a graphic organizer teachers prepare delineating how topic deserves its own paragraph and should include a definition and example

Fourteen years of teaching at the secondary level tell me that sophomores are capable of succeeding at a more rigorous academic challenge than this. Properly guided by teachers, students could master this task with more challenging conditions.

I once heard an individual claim that a great crime against disadvantaged kids, against minority kids in struggling schools was to hold them to a low standard, to expect them to fail. I think the phrase was "the soft bigotry of low expectations." I can't say that AJHS is engaging in bigotry, given the predominantly white nature of our students and predominantly white nature of our teachers and staff and administration. Perhaps its a soft condescension. Or a soft enabling.

Either way it's damning the students residing outside the AP-level courses at AJHS to a high school experience that may not be sufficiently rich for them to achieve greater things later.

First Day Back

Ah, so tomorrow is the first day back after six school days away (and ten real days). What to do . . . what to do. I know, splash the kids with the cold water that is 45 minutes of wall-to-wall teacher-instructed goodness.

Seriously, trying to conduct dialogue on a day like tomorrow is hopeless. Time to just teach. Oh, if only I had the courage to write "Just teach, dammit." in my lesson plan.

One more day off . . .

I'm happy to have one more day off before returning to the January stretch. Still, a problem with being off from the job is that one is away from the kids, and the kids keep me focused on the most rewarding aspects of the job.

By the way, a clarification: the kids = my students, of whom there are right now 78 on my roster

my kids = the two at home