A common mistake I see with many, many educators is that when the end of the school year peeks its head on the school horizon, they begin to – how should I put this – well, they begin to “kind of coast”. They take it easy. They don’t stress, they don’t fret, they do not push the pedal to the metal but instead, they go into “Countdown mode”.

It’s educational quicksand and my warning to you is: Stay Away!

I’ll explain why. But first, some backstory: this educational insight hit me in the bathroom. (I’ll spare you the potty humor right now though, let’s admit it, I am really, really tempted to crack a bodily function joke at this moment.)

See, there’s a guy I see in the restroom practically every day… and every day for the past week, instead of greeting me with his usual, “Hello, Alan,” he has greeted me with, “Only 25 more days, Alan” – and then he adds a beaming smile.

“Only 24 more days, Alan.” (Beaming smile.)

“Only 23 more days, Alan.” (Beaming smile.)

Truly, it’s a great exercise for discussing the literary device of perspective. To this teacher, he sees the dwindling days as an exciting time, as if the torment of teaching will be over oh-so-soon for him and the joys of watching re-runs of Dancing with the Stars, or whatever he does, will begin in earnest. (Look, maybe he he’s a championship knitter over the summer, what do I know?)

The bigger point is that his beaming smile and countdown greeting are not filling me with glee but rather, they are making me tense. (I’ve written about this feeling before.) I have stuff to do, still. I have books I still want to read, projects I still want to tackle and on and on and on.

There’s still so much more I didn’t get to!

Obviously, our classes must reflect our varying dispositions. His class, I am assuming, operates at a leisurely pace whereby the students are, like the teacher, most probably biding their time.

My class operates as if, well, the classroom minutes matter. That’s a choice.

Ya know, we complain so much as teachers about all the stuff that isn’t right, that’s going wrong, that’s being cut or under-funded and so on and yet, here it is that we still have a patch of open road and some teachers are squandering their opportunity to do more, be more, teach more and so on, while others are not.

Really, the way I see it, there is only one way to conduct yourself as a classroom educator this time of year: be the type of teacher you would want your owns kids to have at the front of their class. It’s one of the best litmus tests you can apply to your own personal, self-reflective, professional assessment.

And if I would want my own kids in a class where the teacher is still demanding thoughtful, productive, hard work, then that’s what you yourself should still be doing. (And what parent wouldn’t want this?)

Really, why do the classroom minutes of late May hold any less value than those of early October? Of course, I am not saying don’t have fun. I have tons of fun. (But I do in October as well. Fun and rigor are not mutually exclusive to high quality schooling.)

Additionally, let’s be honest… I love summer, too. Really, I LOVE IT! (Maybe even more than the other teacher does.) But summer is not here yet… and there’s miles to go before we sleep.

(Hey, now that I think of it, maybe I can squeeze in a little extra Frost poetry this year. And connect it to this great article I read on Steve Jobs talking about how even though he is a billionaire on top of the world, he is still as driven as ever… because he feels, I assume, there are still “miles to go before he sleeps”, right? Ah, the possibilities.)

So much vibrant stuff is still available to do… with so little time so please, use the opportunities. It’s the stuff of which our careers are made… and our kids deserve it.

(FYI, I am going to host a free webinar on Finishing Strong next week (May 19th from 6:30 – 7:30 EST. If interested, you can sign up here.)

In addition to doing Professional Development for schools and districts, I also do student assemblies (with my YA author hat on.) And the truth is, while I like doing to adult events, the kids just smoke the grown-ups on the “fun for me” scale… it’s not even close.

Anyway, I did a really cool, very well received student assembly last year at Wilson High School in Long Beach, CA. Essentially, a great teacher over there named Devon Day nudged and nudged me to come, and when I was able to make the schedule work, I did.

The kids were great. The staff was nice. All in all, it was pretty good stuff.

I only mention it because this is the same Wilson High that has been in the news lately… for all the wrong reasons. Tragically, one of their students was fatally shot and killed after their homecoming game. It was front page stuff out this way.

A big theme of mine that day was about choices and trying to advocate for education over violence. As the author of the really popular YA book Homeboyz, a book many of their students just love, I feel it is essential to make sure kids are crystal clear as to why I wrote the book. It’s a cautionary tale, violent and raw and all too real. Studnets, like moths to the flame, are entranced by gangs in this day and age but this stuff ain’t no joke — that’s part of my presentations. Anway, Devon just sent me the following email as her school wrestles with how to move on in the aftermath of this tragedy.

Alan,

I am sure you have read all about the 11th grader here at Wilson High School that was shot and killed on October 30th after the Homecoming game. She died on route to the hospital but was shot at the cross walk coming into the C-side. Alan you’ve crossed it!

Tomorrow I am starting Homeboyz (Year 2 with your book). What a great piece of literature to get the students talking about the consequences of violence. I know I have some kids with street lives in my English classes this year. It will be an interesting time to get the students to open up and write about their experiences, especially with the recent death of Melody Ross. Tonight is a candle light vigil on the campus quad. We expect a huge turn out. I started with one class on Tuesday. I started out by reading parts of chapters one and two with the help of one of my returning students, Alejandro who loves to read out loud. When I told them they had to read the remaining pages to chapter 3 by themselves, nobody complained. I look forward to tomorrow’s activities. I am still using your BookJam curriculum.

Hope all is well.

Devon

On one hand, I am thrilled that a great teacher like Devon finds my work worthy enough to bring into her own classroom to try and teach and reach her kids. On the other hand, I am sad and empty.

I mean I live under the delusion that when I do free assemblies like the one I did for Devon’s school that it’s because it’s gonna make an impact and kids are gonna get it and things are going to change. Unfortunately, I do not have nearly the power I wish I did to help young people avoid the violence which plagues young America today.

It’s depressing. No matter what I do I know that individually it will never be enough. (I mean, I am working on 4 hours of sleep as I type this right now and my voice is so raw from teaching and speaking I am scared of creating scar tissue on my vocal cords — but I just haven’t had a break for weeks).

And yet still, we forge on. What more can we all do but forge on? Not give in to cynicism and bitterness. Not turn to anger or hate. All I guess we can do is put one foot in front of the other.

My heart goes out to the family and friends of Melody Ross… and to the community of Long Beach Wilson. As adults in this world, we have got to find a way to do better by our kids.

Blame is easy. Solutions are a whole different matter.

This weekend, let’s all remember that bullets just took another young student’s life and no matter how much I think about it, it really just doesn’t make any sense.

Good luck, Wilson High. Hope you know there are people in your corner everywhere even if you do not see them.

So this is the letter I typed today in my 3rd period class to my principal:

Hi Mr. ___________ (name withheld — but easily googled I am sure),

I don’t think I’ve written a referral in a decade. Matter of fact, I can’t even find them in my file cabinet.

But in teaching the difference between denotation and connotation in English class today – and asking students to construct examples (prepping for the state test next week), Jose just blurted out in the middle of my room…

“Would SUCK MY BALLS be an appropriate phrase to examine?”

And this is after I clearly said, “No profanity, please.”

Could you please answer his question?

Sincerely,

Mr. Alan

A few things…

1) This is totally true.
2) Jose’s comment went over like an absolute lead balloon. The room went from one of comfort, learning and emotional safety to one of immediate tension and awkwardness. Everyone instantly became uncomfortable.
3) I was flummoxed. The comment was just so inappropriate, so out of left-field, so uncharacteristic of anything that goes on in my room I felt thrown. In my more than a decade of teaching, if I had to rank it, I’d say this was the most inappropriate classroom comment ever uttered in my room. And if you work with teens long enough, you know that you’ve heard some wildly inappropriate things.

The point of the activity was to examine words/phrases and to see if the denotations carry more weight than the connotations or vice versa. My examples on the board were about illuminating the difference between calling someone an “accounting manager” or a “bean counter”. (Similar denotations, wildly different connotations.) So then I had to ask myself, are students today this wildly desensitized to a sense of context, to gauging appropriateness? And in my small effort to try and cut Jose some slack by justifying his actions to myself (i.e.”Oh, Alan, maybe he just didn’t know.”) I realized, “Come on, who am I kidding? Jose was simply pushing the envelope, trying to test my limits. Don’t rationalize it. He was out of bounds.”

So I bounced him out of class with the above letter in hand and told him he wasn’t allowed to come back until the principal had answered his question for him. Such a thoughtful response, I said, required a higher authority on the matter.

Terror ran through the blood of all my other students when I sent Jose on his way. I actually had to lighten up the mood in class because kids mistakenly assumed I was furious with them as a result of something one of their peers did (I was not) — and the tension was simply too thick, a real pink elephant — so we talked about the denotation versus the connotation of the phrase “fly on the wall” and I briefly chatted about how much fun it would be to able to eavesdrop on the conversation Jose was going to have with the principal of our school about his classroom question.

Within a few minutes, things became more relaxed again.

You know, once a person graduates from high school, the days spent in our classrooms often blend into amorphous blobs of scattered recollections. For some reason though, I have a feeling Jose will always have one particular day in English class well-etched into his memory.

As we all know, you can’t be an effective teacher unless you have a line in the sand. And once it’s crossed, there must be consequences. My guess is that by lunchtime, all of my 9th graders will have heard this story, too. Gossip travels faster than a stolen teacher’s test with the answer key does around these parts.

And I expect very few behavior problems in 3rd period for quite some time. LOL!