“How can I better support you?” When is the last time an admin walked into your room and actually uttered those words with nothing more than their “listening ears” on?

I mean really, how dysfunctional are our teacher/admin relationships these days?

I don’t even think most admins view themselves as “supporters”. I think they mostly view themselves as “bosses”.

• Bosses tell people what to do.
• Supporters empower people with the things they need in order to better do that which they have been asked to do.
• Bosses know answers and delegate tasks.
• Supporters identify areas where the tasks that need to be done have gaps and work diligently to help smartly fill those missing pieces.
• Bosses think that they are allowed to be dour, grumpy, and irritable with their underlings.
• Supporters know that one key to supporting anyone well is to be encouraging, approachable and dependable.

How would you characterize your admins? Do they…

• tell people what to do.
• know answers and delegate tasks.
• think that they are allowed to be dour, grumpy, and irritable with their underlings.

Or do they…

• empower people with the things they need in order to better do that which they have been asked to do.
• identify areas where the tasks that need to be done have gaps and work diligently to help smartly fill those missing pieces.
• know that one key to supporting anyone well is to be encouraging, approachable and dependable.

I know this. The best admins I’ve ever had clearly fall into one category over the other.

Why do I choose the books I choose for my class? Me, I always spent a lot of time thinking about the choices of text for my students because, well, for one… I could.

Unfortunately, teachers today are seeing more and more and more micro-management of their curriculums/books/texts by people who do not actually ever have to work face-to-face with any of the real kids in the room.

It’s kind of like going to Web M.D. for medical treatment. Sure, there might be some highly qualified folks who are posting very high quality material there, but only a fool would remove a face-to-face visit with a real doctor from the equation should someone actually fall ill.

Yet, removing the power of the teacher to be a “professional diagnostician” of the literacy needs of the actual kids sitting in the classroom is not only how we operate (all too often), but it’s a wave of tomfoolery that way too many school districts in America have bought into hook, line and sinker because they wrongly believe curing literacy shortfalls in kids today can actually work from afar.

It’s as if the solution to “fixing” our kids can be purchased in a box. Great tools can come in a box. The craftspeople who wield those tools cannot.

Teachers, when I really think about it, have almost been backed into a corner in far too many schools whereby they are supposed to be executors of curricular decisions; not parties to the crafting of the curriculum itself.

And so, how do I decide which books my kids will read? First, I made sure to grab the power to do so.

My feeling was always, “Hey, you hired me to do this job, now I am going to actually do the job,” and no, I am not saying the means always justify the ends. But I am saying that if I hire a contractor to build an addition on my house, I’d be a bozo to stand over them the whole time saying, “Okay, now use the hammer. Okay, now use the saw. Okay, now I want you to use the tape measure, the wrench and then the level – in that order and at these intervals.”

The person who is doing the work needs latitude in order to smartly and effectively do the actual work.

Do teachers have the latitude to make book choices for my their own classes in this day and age. class? Do you?

The teacher as “professional diagnostician”. Our importance in the classroom of today (and tomorrow) – despite the false appearances in the media – is on the rise. The question we all must face is, “Are we up to this challenge?”

As you know, being a high school English teacher at Lynwood has been my life for years and years and years now. And truly, I love it.

Which is why I am taking a leave of absence from my classroom. Simply put, the demands of my professional life have outstripped the ability for me to meet all of these demands in an excellent, balanced, sane manner… and push has come to shove.

For the past years – ever since I was named California’s Teacher of the Year 2007 – my life has pretty much been a stay up til midnight, wake at 5:00 a.m. and work-8-hours-on-a-Saturday type of experience. All while criss-crossing the country year round speaking at conferences and doing Professional Development for schools when I can squeeze it in. Naively, I guess I thought the load would eventually lighten.

It hasn’t. In fact, it keeps growing.

Shockingly, I do not seem to be able to sustain this pace and, when I think about it (and my family), I realize that I don’t need to have a stroke/heart attack/breakdown to grasp the idea that I am burning the candle way too hard – and have been for quite a long time now.

Yet, there are other factors as well.

Clearly, we are suffering from a crisis of demoralization in education today and it my strongest belief that teachers need to be better supported with higher quality tools, strategies and materials that have been proven to work.

Teachers teaching teachers is a solution that makes sense to me. And the need for teachers to have available more PD and better PD is, to me, a glaring national need.

As mentioned, for years I have been speaking at conferences, providing PD for school districts and so on, flying all over the country working to share best practices and provide real solutions to fellow educators as they seek to improve their classroom craft. And each time I have done so, I have bounced back to Lynwood High (often on late night flights) to wake up bright and early to teach at a full-time pace.

To say the challenge has been exhausting would be an understatement. Keeping up with such a powerhouse schedule, all while writing books year round (I have 4 new titles that will be out in the next 24 months) as I strive to remain a dedicated dad and husband has rendered my life out of balance. Yet oddly enough, it’s paid dividends for Lynwood High.

Big ones, in fact.

A little backstory: Two years my school principal asked me to reduce my teaching load to 4 classes and then use the other time in my day to do some T.O.S.A. work for him. (Teacher on Special Assignment.) I turned him down. Why? Because hey, I gotta work here and, as every good camper knows, well… you don’t poop where you eat (i.e. you don’t staff develop where you staff).

But he nagged at me and tugged at me and cajoled me into buying into the greater good of doing PD for our own ELA staff at Lynwood High, taking a greater leadership role on campus, and so on.

So last year I said I’d give it a go. I taught 4 periods and accepted the TOSA challenge. My assignment: share my best practices with our 9th Grade ELA staff and have it pay off in terms of data. That’s right… we needed higher test scores.

Now, it’s no secret how much I detest the current bubble test mania that has swept the nation in a lunatic fashion. (We are digressing into a, “If they do not test it, why should we teach it” world. So dumb!) I find the bubble tests to be poor assessments of both our student aptitudes as well as inferior instruments for determining how well a teacher is actually performing at their job – and I have said so a zillion times over. Standardized bubble tests don’t hold a candle to portfolio-based growth model assessments that incorporate a dimension of Project-Based Learning.

But our school was placed on California’s 100 Worst Performing Schools … by the powers-that-be in Sacramento in 2009. And NCLB had demoted us to such ugly depths (I think it was to level negative 14,123) that essentially, they were threatening us with firing everyone on staff, closing the school, having the state take us over and every other draconian measure you could imagine.

Would I help? Would I teach our teachers? Not full time, mind you. Not even close. I would still teach 4 full-time classes of freshman English. (I’ve taught all grade levels of high school but getting more kids off to a better start at our site has been my thing as of late.)

Between the guilt, the appealing to a higher calling, the fact that I believed I could actually help a great deal if I was given the liberty to meet the challenge on my own terms in my own way without any district or administrative interference (indeed, I sometimes suffer from delusions of grandeur), I accepted the TOSA assignment for a year.

And yes, I got blowback like mad from some “peers”. In the Math and History Department. (Go figure. ELA was totally receptive, but some folks in Math and History brought me to the doorstep of getting mired in the nonsense of nearly filing grievances. Just ugly stuff. Amazing how petty people can be.)

Well, we just got our test scores back for the CST (California State Test, the core element which enables the powers that be to bring the sledge-hammer down on our heads).

The math scores at Lynwood High flat-lined, for the most part. (Actually, in some categories, the lion’s shares of the math scores were up 1%). Science was up a bit in Biology, but down in Chemistry. World History had 0% growth but U.S. History showed some solid gains.

English Language Arts “blew the roof off of it” (to quote my principal).

I was charged specifically with providing TOSA services to 9th grade teachers. (If I recall, there were 14 other educators in the room at the start. We’re a Title I, Urban High School with well over 4,000 kids on campus.)

Now, I don’t know how much you may know about the way state test scores work, but essentially there are 5 categories: Advanced, Proficient, Basic, Below Basic, and Far Below Basic.

The 9th grade ELA scores for 2010 at Lynwood High…
· Doubled the amount of students who scored in the Advanced category, a 100% increase from the year prior.
· Increased the Proficient category by gains of 82.4% from the year prior.
· Reduced the amount of students scoring in the Below Basic and Far Below Basic categories by approximately 25%.

As my principal says, “The numbers don’t lie.”

And this was done in a school besieged by budget cuts, administrative turnover, and immense district turmoil. (Don’t ask. Just google it if you really want to know, but I warn you… close your eyes. Some ugly, ugly stuff went down in our district last year. And of course, it’s always the kids and the good teachers who end up being the collateral damage.)

Essentially, the ELA scores look like a clear anomaly on the school performance data charts.

And when the gains of all of English are taken into account (9th, 10th and 11th grade; the rest of the department started coming into my room at about the halfway point of the year based on the good word of mouth other teachers passed along as to what was going on in the 9th grade meetings) it looks as if the English Department of Lynwood High has practically carried our entire school from being on the 100 Worst Performing Schools in California list to a list that says we made it to safe harbor because we met our AYP and API growth. (Those scores won’t be official til next week and we might miss some sub-groups so who’s to say… but we bounced, and high.)

Now, was it me who did all the work? Of course not! This is our department’s triumph. But what I did do was clear out all the administrators from putting their fingers in our ELA pie and I went about sharing best practices and providing all the other teachers with lessons plans, pacing plans, PBL projects, curricular goals and real materials that, well provided a win/win scenario for the kids (they actually found meaning and engagement in the work) and the teachers (they actually found excitement and rigor and the path to authentic student achievement in the lesson plans).

Indeed, the Lynwood teachers in the ELA Dept did the work. What they needed was
1) the tools 2) the PD as to how best to use the tools 3) the support to implement the tools and 4) the inspiration and belief that we could actually accomplish our aims.

All of this is a long-winded way of me saying, I am not sure right now how to best spend my professional energies. But perhaps, I can help other teachers and other schools get better results without resorting to mindless drill-n-kill worksheets that worship at the altar of the bubble tests as if these inferior assessments are the end-all, be-all raison d’etre for the existence of schools in America.

And not one time did I crack open the textbook. Scores of six pound, deflavorized doorstops went unused on this journey. (Alas, we can’t get the ridiculous amount of money we spent for these things back. And wow, could we use that HUGE amount of cash now. Have you any idea what we must have spent on those things?) We used real books and primary source documents the whole time.

And so, the time has come for a change. But the thing is, people ascending to tackle new challenges in our field is actually quite commonplace for many, many educators.

Some people go into administration and become principals. Others go on to become district coaches. Still others go straight to the loony bin, by-passing all the intermediaries. (Clearly, an option for many of us worth considering.)

Me, I have arrived at the determination that I might just very well be better able to serve the needs of our schools, teachers and students from a different position.

Becoming a fierce advocate for Professional Development is where I am going to start. I mean when I see teachers being kicked around like half-smashed piñatas at an 8 year old’s birthday party by the media, I often think to myself, “I wonder if those teachers were ever properly prepared to succeed in the increasingly-more demanding world of being a modern day educator?”

Let’s be honest, our graduate programs and colleges and universities are doing the best they can (saddled as they are with bureaucracy) but are they really preparing teaching graduates in a soup-to-nuts fashion to excellently meet the demands and rigor of being a real school teacher for the rest of our careers?

Of course not. Because they can’t. It is preposterous even think they could. Teaching is a profession where one must perpetually evolve. Learning the craft does not stop with professional certification yet these days, with district budget problems and cutbacks, PD has been relegated to slightness at best, unavailability at worst.

And so much of it just stinks! Can I tell you how much worthless PD I have been mandated to sit through over the course of my career? It’s why I got into providing PD in the first place… because I thought people deserved better than what so many of these charlatans were providing.

Plus, I gotta wonder if a fire is really being lit under anybody’s butt to change the course of this clearly foundering educational ship right now. I mean look at the circumstances under which my peers at Lynwood are expected to function this year. It’s just nuts!

And I don’t even think it’s the School Board’s fault because the economic shenanigans of Wall Street (can you say sub-prime?) was the fuse that lit this keg of dynamite in the first place. When you have no money, you have no money but still, at what point does a job become untenable?

Plus, Lynwood is not alone. Go to Baltimore, Oakland, Philadelphia, Houston, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta (can I stop typing now?) and you will see story after story after story of the same thing.

The teachers are the good guys, the ones standing our ground giving our best. And yet, we are being blamed for all the ills of today’s classrooms.

Today’s teachers need a deep and frequent drink of Professional Development to meet the demands of a changed world and evolving schools. Yet, if we are able to even eek out a few sips of quality PD over the course of a school year, it’s almost as if we are the lucky ones.

This must change.

The truth is we all wear many, many hats as a classroom teacher these days. (Perhaps even too many… but that’s the job, right?) From academic taskmaster to surrogate parent, from rigorous instructor to compassionate counselor, from behavior management specialist to test preparation maestro, we teach hard skills such as the content area standards and soft skills such as the critical nature of being a young person of high character and resiliency. We manage attendance, staff meetings, parents, bullying, tolerance, hormones, homework, federal mandates, district requirements, administrative memos and papers, papers, papers.

All for a salary that, for many of us, requires there to be a second income in the household.

Yet still, we love our work (when we remember why we took the job in the first place).

Nothing beats our highs and nothings crushes like our lows. We are not cubicle people; we are living, breathing dynamic souls starving for sustenance to sustain our spirits.

Of course, I might not be able to make manifest my highest aspirations for our profession but you know what… I am gonna freakin’ try!

Thus begins the next step for me.

BTW, the downside, I must admit, is scary. After all, when you decide to take a stand for something, people inevitably take their shots at you – it’s like the American way. But the upside will be great for our profession if I can actually make the impact to which I aspire.

We need more PD. We need better classroom tools. We need someone with no political aspirations (I ain’t runnin’ for nuthin’! And that’s official!) to call the Lemons in our profession Lemons. (Why folks are defending weak teachers who game the system when it just hurts all of us is beyond me. And as a teacher, I know that when these folks are “sheltered” it ends up falling on people like me to do more to carry their water – as if I already don’t have a difficult enough job.)

But most teachers – and I mean MOST – are not Lemons. We are professionals who need an empathetic, intelligent and helping hand because we are being ridiculously swamped. We deserve more assistance, we need more support and we have to craft a situation whereby we can obtain these essentials without the buffoonery of bean counters standing in the way of us really reaching today’s real kids.

To be totally honest, I am not sure how I even got into this position of potential influence in the first place. And I certainly never intended to write a manifesto when I sat down to type this up today. But somebody who is not beholden to any political agenda has to start speaking up for what makes common sense.

I mean, sheesh, when I think about the stances some people are taking in the arena of public education, I just have to scratch my head and say, “Uh, hello… like WTF?!”

(Not that I have any strong opinions about the quality that kids and teachers deserve or anything.)

God’s speed to us all this year. The next stage for me now begins and I thank you in advance for your good wishes.

One last note: Clearly, I am incredibly lucky to even get this opportunity… and my writing career is what’s going to be paying the bills for me this year. (Did I mention this was an unpaid Leave of Absence?) So indeed, I am extremely fortunate to even have this opportunity in the first place. With new books of fiction coming out, new BookJams being released and people emailing me to come do speeches for their conferences or PD for their districts at a clip that exceeds anything I ever expected, well, like I said… I am certainly the humble beneficiary of good providence. My aim is to (borrowing a line from Google which I am not even so sure is totally true) “do good”.

Doing high-quality, valuable work for teachers, kids, literacy and schools is my aim and I have a sense that once I regain some personal balance in my life, I might be able to have a greater positive impact outside my classroom at Lynwood High… as opposed to in it.

(But damn, I am going to miss the kids this year.)

It’s been said that we are the change we are hoping to see. Well, I’m tossing my hat into that ring.

Hey, you only live once, right?

When I think about one of the most important ingredients a professional must bring to the table, I inevitably come back to passion.

To caring.

To giving a damn.

For me it is the epoxy that holds work which is of true, genuine value together.

I think about this often when I make my way through this world. When I shop in markets. When I go to the post office. When I call a mega-conglom about my various household services.

Sad to say it, but mediocrity reigns in this day and age and the truth is, I think we have all become so beaten down by crud-o-la performance that we are willing to settle for mediocrity because it at least lets us get in and out of the encounters without too much duress. After all, who hasn’t experienced the 45 minute phone call to nowhere-ville with any one of a dozen banks, cable companies, phone service carriers and so on?

It sucks the downright life out of you!

Heck, when I fly on airplanes the lack of passion for the work being done by almost all airline employees in terms of making my travel experience feel pleasant is glaring. Sheesh, it’s almost laughable to even expect anything more than mediocrity from the airlines nowadays. (Yet, having said that VIRGIN AMERICA and, to an extent SOUTHWEST, do show a verve you just don’t see in most other domestic carriers.)

But what makes the difference in a school? In many ways, it’s just this. Passion. Caring. Dedication. Commitment. Dynamic vitality! When I see a staff of teachers who are fired up about the kids, about the work, about meeting the challenges of the job, I can’t help but feel a sense of pride that, “This is what education is all about.”

And when I see a student that show a steely resolve to meet a challenge, give a better effort, step up their performance, and actually try to “learn” something I become energized and excited and even that much more willing to give even more of myself.

Vigor is contagious. Those who tap that well in their classrooms this year will almost certainly reach and teach more young people than those who do not.

Spend yourself this year. Spend yourself heartily!

Have you ever noticed that some teachers think the work of being an educator would be absolutely awesome if it wasn’t for the damn kids?

Or those stinkin’ parents?

Or those silly administrators?

Or those reprehensible peers?

Or those annoying blogger types? (Okay, I made this last one up as I really couldn’t find any examples of folks who fit this profile. And yes, I searched and searched and searched. Matter of fact, I looked everywhere except in the mirror. LOL!)

All of us have an opinion on what is wrong with education, but how much time do we spend in our conversations speaking about that which is right?

I like the damn kids.

I seek to break bread with the stinkin’ parents.

Okay, screw the administrators. I mean even they feel that way about one another, right? (JOKING!! Admins are so often placed in untenable positions that I don’t know why more people do not recognize that we are often seeing in our schools is a crisis of administration. Too much work for too few people with too many skill sets required to sensibly prosper in the position. I’ll leave that for another blog.)
As for the annoying bloggers, if you come across any, please let me know. Truly, they ought to be tarred and feathered.

I clearly remember a few years ago when my wife said (proudly), “I don’t text.”

That was when she had a phone without a keypad. Now, she loves texting. We communicate/coordinate/touch base with one another through texting. The fact is, texting is a convenient, concise and very user-friendly mode of communication.

And teen girls between the ages of 14-17 seem to agree as the latest data shows that this demographic is now sending approximately 100 text messages per day.

That’s 700 per week.

That’s 3,000 per month.

That’s around 36,000 per year.

And what does that tell us?

1) Get your kid an unlimited texting plan or you are going to pay through the wazoo!

2) Fill in your own blank. If you want to view these numbers through a sour P.O.V. you certainly have the ammo to rail against the influence of hand-held media devices on the youth of today. On the other hand, if you see the upside of new literacies and want to make a case for the role of embracing these tools into the modern day classroom (as opposed to outlawing their use) you certainly have a few arrows in your quiver as well.

Ellen Hopkins has written some ferocious books. Brave, gritty, hard-hitting and read by lots and lots and LOTS of teens. I am a big fan of her work.

Interestingly, a brouhaha has recently surfaced about Ellen’s “dis-invitation” to speak at a Teen Lit Fest in Texas.

I use quotes around the words “dis-invitation” because I really have no idea what actually went down. Where it stands now is that Ellen wrote a blog post called CENSORSHIP BITES that has raged through cyber-space… and now the Teen Lit Fest is being accused of all sorts of things and a bunch of celebrated YA authors have backed out of appearing (after previously accepting an invite) to take a stance against censorship.

The mainstream news has even caught up with the story and now things are really starting to hit the fan. And the people in Texas are looking as if they have big egg on their face. (FYI, Ellen has written some edgy books and is no stranger to having her work censored, I am sure, due to the graphic nature of the content.)

However, some event organizers claim that Ellen was never officially invited – a non-formal inquiry was supposedly floated to her, but not an official invitation – and people are jumping the gun by saying she was dis-invited when in fact, she was never even invited in the first place. (Ellen addresses this quite passionately in her blog post linked above. She clearly states she was indeed invited and then dis-invited.)

So perhaps this is a case of miscommunication combining with the forces of the world wide web to create a kerfuffle where there never really was one? Or perhaps it’s not and people are trying to censor Ellen Hopkins. I don’t know.

But no matter what happened, a big boo-boo was made somewhere and a Teen Reading Festival could be forced to go try and be festive without any authors to add some festivity.

Texas at the center of another storm. Sheesh, they keep this up and New York is gonna be getting jealous pretty soon.

There’s a thing called the Adams Equity Theory. It was named for John Stacey Adams, a workplace and behavioral psychologist, who cooked up a job motivation theory almost 50 years ago.

Essentially it states (as taken from the Mindtools website):

“… employees become de-motivated, both in relation to their job and their employer, if they feel as though their inputs are greater than the outputs.”

If their inputs are greater than the outputs? The entire profession of teaching is build around the idea that the teacher will put in more than they ever get out because teaching is, at its heart, a profession of giving, sharing and illuminating.

Does this mean we don’t need “outputs”? Of course not.

Now the first output one thinks of in the world of work is money. However, I am not one who rides the “Teachers don’t get paid enough” horse… but I could. Teachers do not get paid enough and as a result, (as I have said before) we do not attract America’s best and brightest to our ranks.

Teach for America (TFA) has done a good job these past years of trying to turn this around but their attrition rates are really high and we are seeing a lot of “in for short bursts” type of folks as opposed to lifers in the field.

What are the other “outputs” we can expect?

Positive recognition by society is one. Yet, these past few years have seen teachers demonized in the media as a bunch of incompetent coconuts. Indeed, we make fat, easy targets and heck, why can’t we blame the fact that Johnny can’t read on Johnny’s teacher?

Personal satisfaction from “doing the work” of being a teacher. For me, this one carries the day. It’s the juice of my career and if one was to take this away from me, I could no longer go on as an educator.

The lifestyle of being a teacher. Working with young people keeps you young. Having summers to enjoy summer is a big thumbs up. Remaining in a school environment when you are a person whois attracted to “learning” is another. The teacher lifestyle offers a lot to many of us and we are, in many ways, like ducks in a pond when it comes to assimilating to the lifestyle requirements demanded by the school year.

Indeed, I could list many outputs… but will they ever outnumber the inputs demanded by the job. From taskmaster to surrogate parent, counselor to confidante, ally to coach to disciplinarian to mediator the inputs we put in are perpetual and endlessly shape-shifting.

And so are we destined to be unhappy in our work? According to according to Adams Equity Theory…

“Employees can be expected to respond to this (i.e. when inputs exceed outputs) in different ways, including de-motivation (generally to the extent the employee perceives the disparity between the inputs and the outputs), reduced effort, becoming disgruntled, or, in more extreme cases, perhaps even disruptive.”

Me, I think it’s a personal choice. Disgruntled is a point of view and if you do not see the world as being out of balance you won’t feel short-changed. But if you allow yourself to “keep score” as a teacher, looking for a pro quo every time you quid, it’s going to be a long, long school year.

I wonder, do I hate bad professional meetings more than I love good professional meetings, or vice versa?

If you can count yourself as a person has never suffered through the torment of a terrible professional meeting, raise your hand.

If your hand is up right now, please consider yourself blessed?

And now please put your hand down… your are making the rest of us feel like doing physical harm to you out of petty spite.

Let’s try it from the other side. If you’ve had the chance to be in the room where somebody really challenged your thinking, opened your mind, and stirred your soul, please raise your hand.

Now keep it up.

Now coochee-coochee-koo (I just tickled your armpit).

Hold a sec… gotta go wash.

Okay, I’m back.

Ain’t great PD the best?

So, is the high a better high or the low a lower low?

I’ve been through both and I gotta say… I just don’t know.

So many educators at all ends of the spectrum are trippin’ out these days because of technology. Literally, people are buggin’ out everywhere.

I just heard about a district that purchased Smart Boards for every classroom in the school and MANDATED that all educators use them daily. Being that they spent so much money (and, I assume, drank the Kool-Aid on what the salesperson told them was possible with these devices) the district literally mandated their use.

And two veterans on the staff choose to retire instead of learn how to incorporate these tools into their room on a daily basis.

Does it need to come to this?

From what I was told, the two teachers that retired were both 25+ year vets who still wanted to teach for at least another 5-8 years. And, from what I was told, they were also “good” teachers. These weren’t lemons being squeezed out in a situation where the other members on the staff were thinking, “Phew! Only 24 years, 11 months and 3 weeks too late for them!”

These were, by all accords, two good teachers.

But they just didn’t “get it” when it came to SmartBoards. And worse yet, they just had no real ambition to “get it”. So the district accepted their resignations.

On one hand, as teachers we need do indeed need to continue to grow in the classroom. Both our practice and our tools must evolve as our careers go forward. Since progress doesn’t stop – and since teaching is an art no one really masters – we must be (buzzword alert!) the “lifelong learners” we all too easily tell our students they need to remember to be.

So in my opinion, these teachers could have done a bit more to remain open to the possibilities.

On the other hand, what in the world did the district think they were buying when they purchased those SmartBoards? A “good” teacher is more valuable than a good tool for teaching. Because lots of good tools exist.

But good tools don’t affect the lives of young people the way good teachers do… not even close!

And that, I am afraid, is not going to change.

Allowing this to devolve into an ultimatum feels like folly. “Either use the darn SmartBoard or tender your resignation” doesn’t seem like great school leadership to me. I mean if you are willing to kick “good” teachers to the curb in the name of touch-screen white boards, then why not buy a series of Master lessons on DVD, play them on the tv screens of your classrooms and hire a bunch of security guards to patrol the perimeter to make sure no one is talking, off task, or chewing gum while the instructional video plays.

And if kids don’t have their homework, off to the CLINK!

Plus, if you really think about it, those SmartBoards are going to be outdated before those teachers will.

What, you think that 5 years from now the current piece of “new” technology won’t look to us like a quaint cassette tape recorder?

Check out any computer from 5 years ago. It looks practically prehistoric. (That’s if it can even run the latest software in the first place, too.)

But having good teachers on staff for 5 years? Are they not a more precious resource that all else on our campuses?

In this day and age, it boggles the mind.