I wrote thousands of words this week and read thousands and thousands more on this series about “best” teachers and where they ought to teach.

Gonna come back on Monday after digesting all of the ideas — and all of the Halloween candy — and try to see what’s to be taken from the series.

Certainly had me thinkin’ tons… and it feels like my brain, like my stomach, is pretty full right now.

Trick or treat and HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

In the fourth part of this series, I am going to chat about Why the “best” teachers are needed to teach our “middle level” students.

NOTE: Part I was, “Which students deserve our school’s best teachers?” Part II was, “Why our “best” students deserve our “best” teachers” and Part III was, “Why our “most challenged” students deserve our “best” teachers.” Coming soon Part V: A review of the discussion and a exploration of what I think I’d be forced to do if I were a principal trying to figure out which teachers to assigned to which classes.)

And so…

Why the “best” teachers are needed to teach our “middle level/average” students.

Who are the kids most short-changed on campus?

I’ll take it at face value that no one really thinks the AP/Honors/GATE crowd is the most short-changed. Are they short-changed? Well, in today’s schools, most every group can make a meritorious claim that they are being slighted somehow, but the “best” kids being the “most” short-changed? Nah. That dog just don’t hunt.

Is it the lowest performers on campus? Uhm, I don’t think so either. I mean, face it, they get special monies spent almost exclusively on them, special programs designed to meet their special needs, special attention from the district office all the way on down to the purchasing of special materials to try and meet their academic and socio-emotional needs. Really, what other student crowd on campus has people actually considering the whole child aspect of education today outside of our lowest performing kids? (Seriously, take a moment to think about it. With “low” kids, the whole child aspect of education is self-evident yet with all other kids, that’s just fluff stuff. So stoopid!) Sure, the lowest performers may certainly have disadvantages but as the most obvious squeaky wheel on campus, they also don’t get thrown into the broom closet — they get some grease.

But the middle level kids, the average kids, those are the ones who you’ll find in the broom closet.

Kids with a 2.0 – 2.9 grade point average are the invisible masses on campus. They don’t stand out because of their exceptional academic performance on the positive side of things and they don’t stand out because of their horrific academic performance on the negative side of things, either.

They are bland. They are mediocre. They are average.

And they are the majority! (Unless you live in Garrison Keillor’s world where all the children are above average… so clever!)

Face it, we are spending so much darn time trying to coddle the outer ends of the student spectrum, we absolutely leave the largest swath of kids — the ones in the middle — to… well, to remain in the middle. And the thing is, the kids in the middle are the kids with a high likelihood of reaping the greatest benefits from having the “best” teachers.

Why? Because the “best” teachers get kids to reach deep. To try hard. To plumb and explore and probe and rise to the challenge. You ever see a kid try to rise to a challenge, really take ownership over a school project with all their heart, soul and intellectual determination and… earn a C? Almost never. That’s because the Middle Level students are the ones who most often only need the right button pusher to convert them from being average and mediocre to be above average if not flat out hot-diggity-dog.

But do we push the middle? Do we challenge the middle? Do we set our schoolwide attention to the fact that if we focused our best efforts on our greatest population of kids — the ones in the middle — then we would, it stands to reason, make the most gains simply because we’d be so positively affecting the greatest numbers of students on campus.

Of course not, that would be almost too logical.

We’ve got the top 20% over here. We’ve got the bottom 20% over here. That means we’ve got 60% right smack-dab HERE and yet, where’s the love? We give it to the outer extremes.

And to just flat-out take the gloves off for a minute, could it not be claimed that spending the efforts of the “best” teachers on a school’s “lowest” performers is a bit of a waste of resources since these kids often do not value education as much as they should, do not meet the teacher half-way nearly enough of the time and often end up squandering the golden opportunities being presented to them. (Like I said, the gloves are off and I am tossing political correctness out the window right now to give voice to an argument I know is out there.)

Could it also not be said that to have the “best” teachers teach the “best” students is merely an unfair replication of the ugly part of capitalism whereby the rich just get richer? (And oooh, don’t the rich feel entitled to be and stay rich, even if it comes at the expense of others who appear to be kinda deserving of at least some of their resources?)

How about the kids in the middle, huh? Just maybe they’d rise up if only they were being educated by the “best” a campus has to offer — as opposed to the most mediocre a campus has to offer.

Imagine if we resented the notion of a student being average. We just loathed it. Like we found it far more repugnant than we find a kid with all F’s.

Imagine if we carved a moat in the middle of the school and said, you will either earn a 3.0 average or you will fail. No C’s, no D’s. Either A’s, B’s or F’s.

I’d venture to say that well over 90% of our C students would find a way to step up. And why? Because they are able to. Low expectations are the pandemic plague on the middle level kids but if you force them to be really solid or be nothing at all, they will roll up their collective shirt sleeves and apply some good ol’ fashioned elbow grease so that they can make the grade.

Our best teachers know how to get kids to reach for that aim. Our average teachers do not. Average teachers settle. This is why, if you put our “best” teachers in the rooms of our middle level kids, you will see a sea change in performance. It might just be the greatest difference between these two groups of teachers. Some teachers settle and other refuse to.

BTW, all this “serve the middle” stuff this is not just my own little theory. Maybe you have heard of a small little program called AVID?

Give the middle the “best” teachers on campus. So what if they are the most quiet. Only in education will what is most obvious and most sensible be so clearly overlooked.

In the third part of this series, I am going to chat about Why the “best” teachers are needed to teach our “most challenged” students.

NOTE: This was the question raised in Part I: which students deserve our school’s best teachers?
(I have already made the case in Part II as to why our “best” students deserve our “best” teachers and coming soon, an argument for Part IV: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “middle level” students… as well as Part V: A review of the discussion and a exploration of what I think I’d be forced to do if I were a principal trying to figure out which teachers to assigned to which classes.)

Why the “best” teachers need to teach the “most challenged” students.

Let’s be honest, our “most challenged” students are all-too-often getting the short end of the stick. They are almost always being taught by either our most inexperienced teachers or our tenured “Lemon” teachers in schools today and this creates an almost, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg” syndrome when it comes to identifying the cause of their perpetual, continued low academic performance.

So which did come first, the student with low skills even after more than 5 years in the same school system or the student continuing to have low skills even after more than 5 years in the same school system because they have been under the direction of the Lemon level or newbie educators for most of their career? (NOTE: Newbies, please do not take offense — I only intend to disparage the Lemon teachers. We were all new once and trust me, I wish I could go back and apologize for all that I did not know, wasn’t able to accomplish and so on, to my first two year’s worth of kids — but often what newbies lack in experience they make up for in gusto and effort so while there are certain things about riding a bike you just can’t learn until you have been on the bike for a little bit, there is no fault to be found in people who are just learning to ride their bike — especially when they are often busting their butts to do so. Therefore, when you read the chart below consider that newbies deserve an * which means they get to remain uncategorized until year 4 in the classroom — my own arbitrary number based on my own idea that it takes at least 3 years to get a real grip on this job.)

For point of reference to clarify this all (in case you are just joining), I have divided school educators into 3 categories:

• Best teachers
• Average teachers.
• L’s (the L can stand for “Low” or “Lemons” – fill in your own mental blank).

*Newbies And I have divided students into 3 broad categories:

• AP/Honors/Best
• Middle Level/Average
• Challenged/Low

Obviously, political correctness got tossed out the window so that I could open a “real” discussion. Additionally, I am speaking in generalizations — it’s the only way I can proceed without hyper-qualifying this commentary to death.)

Okay, back to the main point…

Come on, folks, don’t you think we could greatly increase the achievement in our lowest performing students if we set our nation’s “best” teachers to the task in a front and center type of way? The answer seems self-evident.

And really, don’t the kids who are currently behind the academic eight ball deserve a chance to have their classrooms provide for them the best shot it can in order to get these kids on the right track so that the rest of their life doesn’t suffer from the tainted glow of being poorly educated in this society?

As for the top students (who most frequently get a school’s best teachers), could it also not be argued that they are already “gettin’ theirs” in a host of other places anyway?

Yet can the same really be said of the “lowest kids” on our campus? They usually have the least amount of support at home, the most obstacles in front of them at school and the greatest need for top flight professionals to come in and work some magic with them.

But what really happens most frequently across our nation is that the “lowest” kids come to school and get… the “lowest on the totem pole” teachers.

It’s like the game is rigged. The lowest performing students are being overwhelmingly matched with the L teachers… and administrators all over are closing their eyes and hoping that some kind of miracle is going to sweep over the “bottom tier” landscape while their best teachers are off running well-oiled classrooms that prime the top students for an AP curriculum.

Look, we’ve all seen what miracles can be done by great teachers. We’ve all seen the mountains that can be moved. Maybe some of us have even been the beneficiaries of being on the receiving end of a terrific educator’s efforts and gone from, “Ya know, I never got math until poof! Mr. Jaime Escalante was my teacher.”

“Or English until Ms. G. showed some belief in me.”

(BTW, Hollywood certainly seems to believe that our “low” kids can blossom into amazing young adults if only a “best” educator in the school gets to be in the front of their classroom.)

Now let’s take a sec to examine the idea of having a new, first year educator teach the “challenged/low level kids”. It’s their first year on campus, first year as an educator, they are bright-eyed, bushy tailed and then thrown into the most challenging circumstances in any of the classrooms on campus (even though they still do not know where all the bathrooms are located on campus). They get kids with academic skills years below grade level, students with both diagnosed and undiagnosed learning disorders, unstable emotional lives, far-from-ideal home lives, a personal history of shame and belittlement in the realm of academics, and classroom behavior that ranges from the merely disruptive to virtually felonious.

Oh, and let’s not forget the English Language learners or special needs kid that get mainstreamed into their class as well.

Sound like this is a success story waiting to happen for a first year teacher? Of course not. However, we see it all the time. “They” get “those” kids.

And we wonder why our new teacher attrition rates are so high. Ha! It’s because we are utilizing a trial by fire approach with the furnace set to “Roar!” to welcome them into this profession.

Look, “challenged” students make for tough classes. No one will argue this. And what it takes is a skilled educator to reach these kids. It takes a pro, a person with a tool chest full of ideas, experience, know-how and self-confidence. It takes a teacher that knows how to be patient, demanding, light-hearted and a task-master all at the same time.

Plus, it takes intestinal fortitude to want to even tackle this type of challenge in the first place for an entire school year. (It’s a long haul; even if you are a top-flight pro teacher, that doesn’t mean working in these classrooms becomes any easier. You’re just better at it.) Furthermore, it takes an amazing amount of resiliency to know that often when you teach kids at this level it can often be “one step forward, two steps back” for a heck of a long time.

Emotionally that’s draining.

And in the realm of NCLB, it’s almost entirely thankless as well because a teacher who works in a 9th grade classroom with kids that have skills that are at the 4rth or 5th grade level gets virtually no credit on these tests when they elevate their students to a 7th or 8th grade level in one mere academic year — because NCLB measurements aren’t based on growth.

You either make “the cut” or you get “labeled” negatively without any tip of the hat for the productive achievement or positive progress.

Huh? It’s as if the teacher was sitting there reading the newspaper all year. The tests are all or nothing.

Look, let’s be honest — being that the “low” kids are often the most demanding group of students to teach on campus, many, many teachers shy away from the job. It’s hard work, it’s taxing work, it can also feel like unappreciated work. (It also begs the question as to why one is required to have the temperament of Mother Teresa to thrive in this profession, but that’s for another conversation.)

Yet really, has this current system not created a self-fulfilling prophesy with negative implications for all of us? I mean how in the world are the kids with the highest needs ever going to break out of their rut if they are not being given the best chance to do so by having our school’s “best” teachers work in their classrooms.

If we really want to elevate learning and test scores in our schools we need to raise the bottom percentiles. They are the weight dragging all scores down. If, as the cliche goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease than the lowest performing students should be getting more grease (i.e. the “best” teachers).

Would they not benefit? Of course they would.
Is it not sensible? Of course it is.
Could real strides not be attained? Of course they will.

And if we could increase the academic achievement of our lowest performing students could we not, perhaps, also make a dent in poverty. (The link is quite clear between level of education and poverty.)

And if we could increase the academic achievement of our lowest performing students could we not, perhaps, also make a dent in crime. (The link is quite clear between level of education and crime.)

And would it not be in the best interests of our society as a whole to both decrease the level of poverty and crime in our country?

Are we doing what’s most comfortable for the teachers or what’s best for the kids?

Clearly, our most challenged students deserve our “best” teachers.

In the second part of this series, I am going to chat about Why the “best” teachers are needed to teach our “best” students.

NOTE: This was a questions raised in Part I: which students deserve our school’s best teachers?
(Coming soon, an argument for Part III: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “middle level” students and an argument for Part IV: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “challenged” students as well as Part V: A review of the discussion and a exploration of what I think I’d be forced to do if I were a principal trying to figure out which teachers to assigned to which classes.)

Why the “best” teachers need to teach the “best” students.

If you think about it, why should the kids who demonstrate the highest commitment to school and most value their own studies and education not be provided/rewarded with a school’s best teachers? Haven’t they earned it?

After all, which teachers are”best” equipped to challenge these most advanced, most ready, most eager to learn young minds? And which teachers are best prepared to get them ready for the demands of education at the next level of their lives?

Which teachers do we want preparing our next generation of leaders because, truthfully, the top kids in our classrooms today show the highest likelihood of being the “top” leaders/discoverers/innovators in industry, science, medicine, politics, law and so on tomorrow?

It may sound like a silly cliche, but these “best” kids (and I use best in an academic sense, not a sense-of-worth-as-a-human-being sense) represent America’s best chance for tomorrow — and don’t they deserve the best of what we’ve got to offer them right now in terms of our nation’s best educator’s being made available to them today? On these children we are all, in a way, pinning our hopes.

Serving the needs of the top students with our best resources reminds me in a way of the 80/20 rule. Essentially, the 80/20 rule postulates that “20 percent of something is most always responsible for 80 percent of the results.”

I know around my school, the top 20% of our students absolutely carry our test scores. Take them out of the equation and we are looking the state taking us over as an entirely failing institution. We’d be toast! (And what school wouldn’t be?)

The top 20% of our students are also the ones most likely to attend a 4 year college and considering that we have over a 45% dropout rate (from freshman to senior in terms of non-matriculation), these students can also make a heckuva claim that they are the ones most in need of rigorous college prep at the pre-collegiate level.

And who better to prepare a kid to face the SAT’s and the AP exams than our school’s “best” teachers? I mean those tests are tough and a great educator can certainly make a great impact on student performance. (Not that tests like these are the end-all, be-all — and if you are familiar with my disposition, you probably know my feelings of BLARFF about bubble tests but still, low SAT’s = virtual exclusion from top-flight universities so let’s not be Pollyannish about the significance of honors and AP classes.)

In yesterday’s post, I divided school educators into 3 categories:

• Best teachers
• Average teachers.
• L’s (the L can stand for “Low” or “Lemons” – fill in your own mental blank).

If we put the L teachers at the front of the room of the AP classes, are we giving our top kids the best chance we can for them to be competitive in a hyper-competitive “get accepted to a university” culture?

If we put the “average” teachers in the front of the room of these classes, are we really cultivating the best and brightest minds in our schools in the most advantageous way we can? I mean how often do “average” teachers create outstanding results?

A school’s “best” students are the ones most likely to do all of their homework, dive most deeply into extra-curricular activities, show an overt thirst for academic challenges and demonstrate a willingness to go over and beyond the “normal course of student duties.”

And you’re going to tell me that kids like this aren’t most deserving of being placed with a school’s best teachers?

Plus, if you are a parent of an “honor” student and you find out that the “best” teachers on campus are not being made available to the “best” students because the school has a philosophy that dictates that the “best” teachers are going to be put with the “lowest” performing kids, aren’t you going to say, “Well, that’s great for them… but then I am going to send my kid to a different school, one where they get the “best” that can be offered to them… because, darn it, my kid has proven they deserve it — and they need it in order to excel later in life.”

The argument states that our best deserve our best. And if you are a school principal don’t you most probably agree? Paying short shrift to our “best” students by not providing them with the “best” teachers, well… how is this “best” for the whole school? What, are you going to put a first year novice teacher with the school’s top students when you have an opportunity to place a veteran with a strong track record in that very same class? Are you going to put a “tenured, worksheet-based, newspaper reading, leaves the moment the bell rings every day” teacher with the top students when you can put in “a hungry, lives for this job type of educator” who constantly seeks to advances their own professional capacities and takes leaderships roles in a variety of capacities of their own volition?

Dangerous as this is to say, there is a very solid argument to be made for why our best deserve our best if you are an administrator that is forced to choose.

And they are all being forced to choose.

(NOTE: Before you blast away at me, please remember that I am going to post in the next few days an argument as to why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “middle level” students and an argument for Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “challenged” students. This is just Part I of a series — but all thoughts, comments, personal attacks on my intellectual inferiority and moral repugnance are welcome.)

So I am going to try something new and pose a question. Here we go: Which students deserve our school’s best teachers?

Next I am going to answer the question. (One sec.., it’s coming.) And then I am going to explore this question over the course of the next 3 blog posts (it’s too long to dive into in just one post) as I have divided an argument for my answer into 3 parts.

And then, based on the comments, feedback, answers I get, I am going to see if I still arrive at the same answer I now currently believe after exploring the issue in the ning community and exploring a variety of it’s nooks and crannies.

And so, once again, back to the question: Which students deserve our school’s best teachers?

My answer is ALL our students deserve our best teachers. However, it’s not possible to provide every kid with the school’s best teacher. Not everyone can be best. Thus I will divide teachers into 3 broad categories.

• Best teachers
• Average teachers.
• L’s (the L can stand for “Low” or “Lemons” – fill in your own mental blank).

Furthermore, I am going to divide students into 3 broad categories:

• AP/Honors/Best
• Middle Level/Average
• Challenged/Low

(Note: please don’t hammer me on my political incorrectness – or political correctness – in this “naming of levels” for if I dwell on choosing names that won’t offend anybody across the nation I’ll never get to the more meaty issues in this discussion.)

And now, let me repeat the question again: Which students deserve our school’s best teachers?

And let me repeat my answer again. ALL of them do. But since this is simply not possible to achieve, let’s pretend I am a principal and I need to set up my school. Which teachers do I place with which students?

Here’s what is coming:

• Part II: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “best” students.
• Part III: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “middle level” students.
• Part IV: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “challenged” students.
• Part V: A review of the discussion and a exploration of what I think I’d be forced to do if I were a principal trying to figure out which teachers to assigned to which classes.

Should be interesting – and exciting, controversial, spicy and thoughtful. I’m fired up.

All thoughts are welcomed.

T.S. Eliot was wrong — October is the cruelest month, not April — which he should have known because at one point he was a schoolteacher. And not too be too critical of a Nobel Prize winning poet, but I think if he would have really considered the plight of educators in the month of October, The Waste Land might have gone in a slightly different direction.

As almost all teachers know, October is the part of the marathon race that is every school year whereby the end is so far out of sight it’s not even worth looking out on the horizon for it. Yet, the bloom is completely off the rose in terms of the freshness of a new year having started so that any sense of a “honeymoon with the new kids” is long since blam-o! And any re-charging or the batteries that was done over the summer has long since seen its reserves tapped, as well.

There’s no holidays. There are no breaks. The days get shorter and cooler and wetter. (I mean I love the Fall, don’t get me wrong, but even the weather conspires against us a wee little bit.)

October is a long stretch of road.

On one hand though, October is a great month for me though because I get a heck of a lot of uniterrupted teaching time in. It’s where the path of the year gets deeply plowed. On the other hand, teachers like me endure small little things like incapacitating throat infections which would sideline most mere mortals and yet, since I barely have enough time to accomplish all the things I plan to tackle even when I’m healthy, I certainly do not feel I have the time to call in sick — and so, inevitably during the month of October, I trudge on in, up before the sun, looking like a teacher that should really be spending their day in bed with a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and I suck it up and work through the themes of Frost, figurative language of Maya Angelou or the mood of Poe knowing that the weekend is only another 5 days and 188 essays away.

And this week, for the extra added bonus, we have Halloween in the air. Now, personally, I simply LOVE Halloween. One of the most fun times of the year for me. However, just the idea of it being in the air makes the kids both restless and mischievous. And for the students on campus who are not the most “academically oriented kids in the first place” Halloween week is almost a green light for them to cause trouble.

Ask anyone on campus this week and what you’ll find is people who are feeling stretched, tired, and over-worked. Now personally, I am a fan of these things because education is like muscle building and sometimes you have to do the sweaty, hard, strenuous work that stretches all the sinews in order to make productive gains. On the other hand, it’s easy to advocate for this type of workout but hard to actually get in the gym and be the weightlifter who has to pull it off.

October challenges me as a teacher. It makes me reach down, it makes me work hard and it forces me to keep my eyes on the prize and not become distraught over the insane amount of work which needs to be done in an almost un-doable amount of time under quite unreasonable circumstances.

Yet, like the Maya Angelou I am teaching this week, Still I Rise.

Some days I am a madman. I can crank out 2,200 pretty-close-to-publishable-words in a day’s work and then come right back and do another 2,200 the next day. (Usually in the summer when I am off from teaching.) Without a doubt, when I am in the midst of a novel and it is rolling, let me tell you, it can get rolling!!

And then there are the days when I know that to be a real writer, you gotta trudge through the sludge.

I actually happen to be in that exact phase right now. It’s hard. The work is laborious. It’s tormenting. Nothing comes easy and the fun is cranked way down to level “low”.

I mean, I swear I have re-written this freakin’ part of my forthcoming book at least 15 times… and it still isn’t right. And the thing is, a part of me doesn’t even know what “right” is. If I knew, I would just execute it. All I seem to be able to identify is what’s “wrong” and let me tell you, that part’s easy. It’s always much more simple to find the problems in writing — especially when you keep reproducing things “wrongly” in a variety of different forms — than it is too see the answers to the issues.

It’s a point worth repeating: it’s hard to figure out the solution if you don’t know the problem. (And welcome to my current life.)

However, I don’t really have any other options here. In truth, I must forge on. I mean I can throw a temper tantrum, smash my computer, kick a puppy (okay, not a puppy… a kitten! I can kick a soft, little fluffy meow-thing with big eyes and the cutest, most dainty paws you ever saw and… joking. I’m joking pet lovers. Please save me the emails please – I am still not over the wrath of Alabama). The point is, none of that is going to solve my “book” problem.

It’s like being on a mountain and base camp is just up ahead. There’s comes a time when climbing Everest — and writing what book isn’t, in its own way, like climbing some form of Everest? — when there’s no turning back and you must simply just find a way to put one foot in front of the other to get to the next plateau.

That happens to me every time I write a novel. Sure, seed ideas come easily enough and with them the excitement of the story’s promise, the vision of a smashing end result, the delusion that it’s all going to unfold perfectly without any problems in terms of plot, character, motivation, setting, dialogue, credibility, perceptive, insight, originality, and on and on and on.

Yet inevitably, you gotta trudge. That’s because the only way to solve the problem is to work the problem and in my experience, time spent giving it your best go is the only antidote. Sure, I sit down quite often not having any clue how I am going to solve some “pickle”. But I do know that the pickle isn’t going to solve itself for me — I am gonna have to have at it.

With my book Homeboyz, I finally realized what my problem was with a scene that took place in Juvenile Hall and the answer was that I needed to trim 16 pages from the book to solve the issue.

That only took me a month to figure out.

BTW, do you know how hard it is to trim 16 pages from a book — 16 pages you have already written? Well, actually, it’s not that hard once you identify the problem because once I did, the rest of the novel opened up for me. Homeboyz, btw, won an award from the American Library Association… an award I am not sure it would have won if I wasn’t willing to cut those 16 pages. Why? Cause you have to do what’s best for the writing — always! Follow that rule and there will be material left on the cutting room floor that was just delicious… yet if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. So axe it!

Sometimes I’ll rip off three pages in less than 2 hour’s time and they will be rockin’! Other times I will get into a knife fight with two sentences that take me 4 hours.

It’s just the nature of the beast.

However, I never, ever, ever feel like giving up. Why? Because I always wanted to be a writer and this aspect of that job is the fine print. Sure, I could give up. I could decide I don’t want to climb Everest anymore — or enter in knife fights with sentences that perpetually attempt to puncture my spirit. But the thing is, I made the decision to want to write a book when I was lucid, calm and rationale — so giving up my career when its midnight and I am tweaked on the end of a caffeine buzz, filled with too much candy and ready to kick kittens, well… it doesn’t make much sense.

I never know when the light will go on but I do know that “To Be a Writer You Just Gotta Trudge Through the Sludge”.

So I gotta hand it to Arne Duncan cause the man is not afraid to use pointed words and ruffle some feathers. His latest spear is aimed at teacher training programs. (BTW, I do not say “spears” in a condescending manner because when you look at the state of education today, you gotta admit, we need some “new stuff” and unless you are willing to break some eggs you’re not going to be able to make a new educational omelet — so a part of me salutes Arne Duncan in a BIG Ol’ WAY simply for calling a pink elephant a pink elephant.)

Check it out, Mr. Duncan is letting ‘er rip against our teacher training programs.

He calls for “revolutionary change”. On one hand, it’s a bit of a political platitude but on the other hand, he’s right. We do need MAJOR change. And why? Well, as Arne points out, many, many new teachers, “…say they did not get the hands-on teacher training about managing the classroom that they needed, especially for high-needs students.”

I am not sure if there are going to be too many folks that disagree with this statement. I mean look, right now we pretty much throw new teachers to the wolves (that’s a figure of speech, btw… well, kind of… kidding!) and the ones that survive the first three years are the ones that get to be part of the “club”.

And the ones that shuffle away, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes, are the ones that got body slammed one time too often in the WWE of NCLB and the DOE.

Matter of fact, there are droves of these body-slam victims. I can’t tell you how many people I know that hung up their spurs within the first few years absolutely baffled by the reality of being a teacher — even after having earned a graduate degree to pursue this professional aim.

It’s absolutely crazy. Too many teacher programs have devolved in far too many ways into mere classes on theory where book study and hypothetical scenarios are the foremost way an aspiring teacher learns about their craft.

You wanna learn what it’s like to be a teacher in a “high needs” school — and come on, we all know that the phrase “high needs” is a code word for low income, under-resourced, quite often high minority population institutions with all kinds of serious problems going on — then you have to step inside a classroom.

There is simply no other way to prepare for the job of working in a “high needs” school without actually working in a “high needs” school.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Mike Tyson quotes of all time. Once, in his heyday, when asked to respond to the apparently smart and well-thought out pre-fight strategy illuminated by a forthcoming opponent (i.e. the guy had laid out his very tactically sound plan to defeat Iron Mike when Tyson was in his prime) Mike Tyson glibly responded, “Look, everybody’s got a plan until they get hit.”

And ain’t that how it is for these new teachers? They come in with seating plans and behavior management plans and disciplinary plans and lesson plans and all sorts of plans… and then they get “hit”.

• “Hit” by the reality of kids dropping f-bombs in the middle of class.
• “Hit” by the reality of having 39 kids in a room with only 33 desks.
• “Hit” by the reality of being charged with raising the literacy levels of students that come into their 10 grade classes with 4rth grade reading levels.
• “Hit” by the reality of low socioeconomic home lives, transience, absenteeism, violence, alcohol, sex, drugs and so on.

That’s why I just love Iron Mike the philosopher… “Everybody’s gotta plan until they get hit.” Well, in “high needs” schools they do get hit…and nobody is properly preparing them for the inevitable kidney punches.

Come on, basically we are sending in an army of coddled, young, idealistic theorists into these “high-needs” places under the delusion that if a kid talks too loudly or profanely in class, you can actually send them to the principal.

HA!

Wait til they call a parent to discuss how “the poor linguistic choices of a student can be rectified” and the parent starts using more profanity than the kid ever did and thinks you, the teacher, are the real problem in the equation — and not their little angel.

It’ll make your head spin… especially if no one warned you (back in graduate school during your teacher training, of course) that it was coming.

Give a kid a book on riding a bike and have him study and study and study… it’s not going to matter. Until that kid actually rides the bike, he is not qualified to call himself a “bike rider”.

It’s why the GRE’s and such are simply preposterous. Has anyone looked at the subject area test for the GRE’s lately? (I’ll save that for another post.) Lu-di-crous!!

But ETS is on the job so no worries folks, right? (Garsh, do they irk me — the tail that wags our educational dog on so many fronts and yet, who calls them out on it? Sheesh!!!)

look, you have to find your own sense of inner balance, whether it’s bike riding or teaching — and without real time in a real classroom saddle to do so, it’s no wonder our national attrition rate in these “high needs” schools are so astronomical.

I just wonder why it’s taken so long for Washington D.C. to recognize what appears to me to be a pandemic problem?

However, let’s be honest — to properly train new teachers we are going to have to elevate spending. The fact is, professional development is under seige at the same time that classes are swelling, money for academic resources are dwindling and teachers, who already struggle to make ends meet financially in their personal lives, are taking pay cuts all across the country. Me, I took a 3% cut this year and some furlough days… to work with more students with less supplies… but you can see why people would be beating down the door to jump on the this career train right?

Fact is, people become teachers because they want to give and because they want to teach. Educating others is a form of service to the community and dorky as it sounds, it just feels good for the soul. I mean if money was the foremost reason these people were in grad school, they’d head to Wall Street instead where a person who loses billions for their company gets rewarded with hundreds of millions in pay. (Because there’s a limited talent pool, of course, for people with the deft skills to keenly navigate such elite waters. HA!)

I’d love to see a reinvention of teaching training programs because when I look out on the horizon and see how these places operate, I see that they are filled with scores of good, smart people who are fossilized and politicized.

Who is putting the kids first? And since so many of our “high needs” school can’t seem to do that, why in the world did we ever expect to look up and discover that our farm system for teachers (the teacher training programs) were doing it excellently well?

I applaud your intent, Mr. Duncan. But platitudes don’t feed the bulldog. We are gonna need to see action.

What we need are programs that are, first and foremost, about the K-12 students

I want to keep this short and sweet today but I feel as if I owe an apology to the folks in Alabama who found my blog post from two weeks ago to be hurtful, inappropriate and incendiary.

That was never my intention. And you should know that I took down the post.

Though I thought I went out of my way to salute the educators making strides in the Deep South — the ones really laying it on the line in an admirable way who are working their tails off, bringing change and fighting for social equity in the Alabama schools — apparently, that point was lost and some Alabamians felt unfairly targeted. Re-segration through gerry-mandering was the broad picture theme of the post but I have a tendency to be flippant, smarmy and insensitive at times in my quest to be entertaining as well as informative — and I seem to have genuinely hurt some people’s feelings.

I am not Glenn Beck. I am not an anger-monger. I actually find this kind of rage to be detrimental to productive growth and in the spirit of seeking to open an earnest dialogue, I instead opened something else to which people took a great deal of offense.

I have no ambition at all to hurt people, destroy the morale of educators and the such. And with so many teachers already feeling demoralized (see this article — a whopping 40%!) I certainly have no aspiration to add more salt to our collective educational wounds.

BTW, choosing to take down the post was a real Catch-22 for me because I am not one prone to bow to pressure or censorship. However, in the end I believe I erred. I made a mistake. Why? Because I was insensitive and even came across as haughty (cause it ain’t like the state of California doesn’t have issues with race, poverty, small-mindedness and so on… which I do feel I often point out in my blogs but hey, that’s a different story.) Yet at the end of the day, my greatest mistake was that I added a bunch of negativity to a bunch of hard-working educator’s lives and that’s not who I want to be nor what I want to do… so I have taken a step back and decided to simply say, “I am sorry and I will try to do better in the future.”

Obviously, some people are gonna be furious with me forevermore for insulting Alabama. I can’t change that. However, I do know that if there is a productive, positive conversation to be had about gerry-mandering school district zones and institutionalized racism, by no means will I be shying away from this topic in the future, Alabama or not. But I will work harder to make sure I don’t paint such wide brush strokes in the name of going for a giggle.

I messed up. Oops! Time to move on.

So how did I become a published author? I think the first answer I’d offer is, “mathematically”.

Here’s how I do it nowadays.

I am a full time high school teacher. This means I am up really early and am perpetually over-worked by the demands I face at school. But still, as we all know, so, so many teachers have 2nd jobs to make ends meet. I am no different. My school salary is not nearly enough to meet the financial demands of modern day life — especially in Southern California — so I, too, have a 2nd career.

That of an author. And to be an author, I have to write. Time (thus) becomes a professional tool which I must value and utilize well.

Here’s how it breaks down for me during the school year. (Note: this is a rough sketch, actual numbers

Monday through Thursday I make sure to put in at least 2.5 hours per night writing. Usually, my 3 year old daughter is in bed by 7:30 so between the school day ending for me a bout 3:45 p.m. and me allowing some time to get home, have dinner with my little “boo”, read her books, kiss my wife, exercise if I can squeeze it in and so on, I am usually “in the chair” by about 8:30. And I’ll go til 11. (Though I’ve been known to go to almost 1 on school nights which is nuts when you are up at 5:30 every morning but that’s another story.

All told, this makes for a minimum of 10 hours per week. (Friday nights are optional for seat time. Sometimes I work, sometimes I go out on “date night” sometimes I’ll rent a movie… but yeah, I’m a bit of an addict so probably twice a month I’ll do some stuff.)

Saturdays are 6 hours of writing time for me. Gotta do it. I need long stretches of uninterrupted time and the way I look at it, who doesn’t work 6 days a week. (Paper grading is the beast for me — avoiding it, that is. I bust my butt to get it done in the M-F wndow though, of course, some Sunday afternoons are spent with student compositions in hand.)

However, Sundays are also family day. I mean no writing at all. No computer, no email, no blogging. I will read some newspapers online if the moment allows but family day is family day. For example, this Sunday we’re all going to a pumpkin patch to prep for Halloween.

Add it all up and I do an average of 16 hours per week which equals 64 hours per month… and if you multiply that by a 9 1/2 month school year that’s 608 hours of writing time per school year.

But I get holidays, Spring Break and X-Mas, and summer. Let’s call it an 7 week “working summer” for me of a 35 hour per week writing week. (I work harder but it’s summer so let’s pretend I chill out more than I do.

That’s 245 more hours of writing. Add it all up and we are at 853 hours per year.

Now let’s imagine I am only good for 1/2 a page per hour of writing time. (Trust me, I am way better than that but I also put in a lot of “think time” for my books — despite what my critics may say… LOL! — which doesn’t translate into actual page production yet counts as “writing time”. So 1/2 a page per hour seems fair.)

Do all this math and you are talking about 426.5 pages of production each year from me.

All in all, writing a book is like eating an elephant; there’s only one way to do it.

Bite by bite.

If you want to be a writer, you have got to find the time. Writers, as I have said before, write.