Yesterday I blogged about how I was thinking of adding an occasional Dear Alan wrinkle to my blogs. This was a question posed to me.

Hi Alan, Could you please do a blog about rosaries being a sign of gang affiliations? My high school has had six police cars in the last week, added security and two lock-downs. We have a gang problem. Our high school accepted more schools of choice kids than any other district – no background checks – period. We had a rumor this week that someone was going to come in and shoot up the school. It was not substantiated. We had so many students absent on the day it was supposed to happen, it was unreal. Students were scared. Staff was scared.

In our “Emergency Staff Meeting,” I brought up the fact that many of our students are suddenly wearing rosaries and this is a gang symbol. Our administration basically told me that I was absolutely wrong and that it’s a trend. This is the same administrator who after I sent reported a student wearing a tshirt with his gang air-brushed all over it, he called him out of class and made him turn his t-shirt inside out and then sent him back to my class for two hours. It was hell. The kid was furious and was extremely disruptive. Some staff said that I never should have reported it because I could get my tires slashed…
I’m frustrated! Did you ever deal with gang issues in your classroom and was your administration helpful?

I know for a fact that rosaries are a touchy subject, but I also know that many students are strutting their gang affiliation right under our noses and not one person is doing anything about it. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Okay, have I ever dealt with the problems of gang members in school? Yes.

Have I ever dealt with silly admins who were entirely too dismissive of the very real threat that these kids posed to the safety of other other kids or to staff? Yes.

How did I handle it? It’s a REAL challenge. I mean Grade A number 1. And when it comes to kids and gangs and violence and schools, there are no easy answers. Anyone who tells you there are is probably trying to sell you something.

On one hand, to let the threat of these kids take precedence over education is to allow “the bad guys to win”. (And save the hate mail, please. I have done EXTENSIVE work with gang kids and I clearly understand how troubled these young people actually are. Read my book HOMEBOYZ if you doubt my street cred on this front. But I do need a simple [oversimplified] term right now to address the bigger issue and, in case you have your head in the sand, some of these kids are actual felons with violent and malevolent dispositions… so if I am not all-that-PC right now in using the term ” bad kids” please know that if you have ever been in the thick of it, the word “bad kid” is a very mild description as compared to some of the stuff being perpetrated by more than a few young people today. Anyway…)

Thus, as a teacher I am torn. Why? Because it’s my job to be on the front lines and make sure the “bad guys” do not win… so making sure that I don’t let their fear and intimidation tactics sabotage my professional aims is VERY important. It’s why, when I have had days like these, yep, I did, indeed come to school.

Then again, I did so with a prayer in my heart. And why’s that? Because I have no aspiration to “die for the cause”. And when foolish admins don’t take threats of violence like this seriously, I think heads ought to roll. I mean Holy Moly, we we need proactive responses to the threat of violence in schools – not reactive ones – and reactive ones are what we all-too-often see.

There were days that I truly believed it was going to take something as tragic as a teacher to get shot before I’d see a reasonable response to the frequent threats of violence I felt on campus. Thank God nothing like that happened. But do I think far too many admins are playing with fire on this front? Oh, hell yeah!

Of course, I do student assemblies all the time across the country. And just last week I did one in at an inner-city school and asked the crowd (hundreds of urban high school kids), “How many of you know someone that has been shot?”

At least 40% of the hands flew into the air.

Think about that. Put that in context of your own high school experience. Put that in context of your ability or desire to do homework when this is what your home life/neighborhood existence is like. Me, I didn’t know one kid who had been shot when I went to high school. Not one. And if a friend or cousin had died at the hands of a bullet, I really don’t think my ability to prepare for bubble tests like the SAT would have been the same.

(Side note: My goodness, I took the SAT over 25 years ago. Can we please build a better form of student assessment before the year 2200 hits?!)

See, the rule for shootings is pretty simple: avoid it happening to you. Do whatever you need to do in order to avoid being shot. Everything else is secondary. It’s why you give a mugger a wallet instead of standing your ground. Bullets trump!

This means that if means the rumors are flying and there’s a chance that someone might get blasted on campus, as a kid, most play it, “Better safe than sorry.”

And I don’t disagree with them at all. Live to learn another day. Especially, if you do not feel the school has an adequate grip on things.

Plus, if I am a parent and I do not feel the school is being as diligent as they ought (and in your case, it seems pretty clear to me that the parents probably wish the school was able to better insulate the campus from the community violence) then there’s no way I am sending my kid to school that day.

Safety first. That’s the rule.

Additionally, if the teachers are scared it’s because they lack faith in the authorities who are supposed to be able to ensure campus safety actually exists. Cavalier attitudes combined with, “you better not report that kid or else your tires could get slashed” tips from fellow peers wouldn’t inspire me much at all to believe, “Yep, the adults on campus actually have a good grip on this.”

My feeling is that if the teachers are being asked to deal with “gang kids” that are being sent to the office, then sent back to class with their t-shirt inside-out, the implied message is, “just teach, would ya… and don’t send me your minor problems”… which shows a total lack of appreciation for the fact that kids will die for the affiliations being boasted about on their shirts.

As an adult we may think it’s stupid and what-not, but to kids who are real gang-bangers, that’s their “flag”. And they will “represent” for their hood.

They will shoot for their hood, they will fight for their hood, they will shed blood for their hood.

And if school allows them to fly their flag on campus, it’s inviting fantastic amounts of trouble. A campus with these challenges needs to have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to attire because really, attire is a gigantic fuse.

The rosaries, now they are a touchy subject because of the religious implications, But if gang-members have absconded with the symbol and violence is a by-product of the rosary’s association, IMHO, they gotta go.

That’s my take. And I have a feeling even nuns might agree with me on this one.

So, what can you do?

1. Stay safe.
2. Create an environment where your students feel safe. (to the best of your ability).
3. Don’t be afraid to be a whistle blower when admins are not doing what you feel they ought to ensure campus safety. Better for nothing to happen with extra precautions than something to happen due to less precautions.
4. Remember, if you are scared, the students are even more afraid… even if they do not seem to show it. Dialogue, expression, exploration of “what we can do to make our campus community better”, there are all sorts of things. But to deny it… it’s just begging for trouble. Cancer thrives on inattention.
5. There is no real playbook for this sort of thing. Talk to six different educators and you might get six different answers. At the end of the day, you sort of have to follow your heart.
6. This icon really tells a tremendous part of the story. I am not sure they have all the same puzzle pieces I would list, but the big point is that it takes a lot of different folks to keep a school safe.

America really has a variety of different school systems all living under the banner of American Education.

Some schools know absolutely nothing of violence on campus. Others can’t even imagine how the school might operate on a day to day basis without the threat of gangs and violence.

The only thing I can tell you is that, at the end of the day, senselessness seems to have grabbed certain corners of public education by the throat.

So a kid breaks the school rules by say, ditching class, and what do we do? Suspend them for 5 days.

Oh, that really teaches them.

Maybe back in the old days being suspended from school carried a stigma but for oh-so-many of my kids, when they get suspended, it’s like a vacation for them.

Sure, maybe they get in trouble at home. Perhaps their mother is angry at them or what-not… but what we’re inevitably doing is making a problem that much worse by keeping kids out of class.

I say, when a kid violates the rules and earns a suspension, what they should really earn is School Boot Camp.

That’s right… you have a major infraction, that means more time, not less at school working on your deficiencies of both character and academic ability… and you are going to be forced to contribute to both your own benefit and that of the campus at large.

Obviously, we are talking Saturday School here. (BTW, immediately we have a deterrent. Right now, being threatened with a 5 day vacation/suspension is not any kid of deterrent with teeth at all. But make a kid give up weekend hours and you’ll see a newfound respect for campus law.)

Instead of 5 days worth of suspension, I say we given them a month of Saturdays, from 8:00 – 3:00.

The “suspension time” would be divided up into two categories. Personal enrichment and campus beautification.

I’ll start with campus beautification. That’s a euphemism for grab a freakin’ broom, buster… you are going sweeping.

And wiping.

There’s gum to be scraped, graffiti to be removed, trash to be picked up and bathroom sinks to be polished.

You violate the rules of this community, you need to step up and improve the ambience of this community.

That’ll learn ya!

But there’s gotta be academic work, too. Clearly, there is often a link between low academic skills and behavior issues. How about if the suspended student’s learning profile was taken into consideration and if, for example, they showed a lack of proficiency with pre-Algebra skills, they were afforded the intervention needed to help them raise their mathematical abilities?

I know. Too sensible. Send ‘em home, let ‘em meander and pretend we all don’t ultimately pay for it later on once they are uneducated adults.

When you think about it, school suspension makes no sense.
A kid’s time could be used so much more productively to forge character as well as academic aptitude.
A month of Saturdays is a much better approach to trying to snap a misbehaving kid into shape.
I say SCHOOL BOOT CAMP!

I just got spit on. That’s right, spit on. By a student.

And no, they did not catch them.

See, this Saturday we are going to have a campus beautification day. Our school has been hit by a flood of graffiti as of late and the truth is, we need more than just the custodial staff to improve the campus environment.

So the administration or ASB or somebody came up with the idea of having a campus beautification day whereby we get the students, the staff, the parents, the community to come and paint and plant flowers and so on. Me, I am even planning to bring my 3 year old daughter down to help out.

So, in order to really “sell” the idea to my kids, I planned a whole lesson around this day. We wrote and chatted about graffiti, about why kids tag up campus, about the implications for those “good kids” who don’t want to be known for attending a “ghetto school” (their words, not mine) and so on.

And then, in order to bring a little more of the the lesson home, we took a walking tour, as a class, of campus.

Our school is an open-faced three story building designed by architects who absolutely had NO IDEA how to intelligently plan for an urban campus. There are nooks and crannies, blind corners and “hiding spots” everywhere. The school’s design plagues our school security personnel like mad.

Anyway, while standing in front of a “COMPITAS” piece of gang script — it must be a 15 foot piece of tagging in one of the central corridors of school — I was leading a thoughtful discussion with the students on the destruction we saw before us.

It was a fantastic lesson. 100% engagement from 100% of the kids in my class with plenty of vigorous debate as to the reasons for – and the implications of – what we saw in front of us.

That’s when a kid from either one or two stories above (I don’t know, I never saw him) spit on me. Right in the middle of my lesson.

And to boot, I was wearing a white shirt. Crisp, clean, bright. It’s ruined.

I can’t even begin to express how badly I feel/felt. Makes me want to quit. Literally, it makes me want to walk away.

I think everyone has a breaking point and the fact that I while I am out of class working to bring a lesson to life in a way that is unique, meaningful and important to a HUGE group of kids and… well, I get spit on by kids that are ditching, well… is that what teaching is today?

Is this the humiliation a person has to endure?

Is this some sort of symbolic event that I am too freakin’ stupid (or thick) to be able to read the tea leaves on?

Is this really what my job is?

You wanna know how the budget cuts impact our campus? We have less security which means we have more kids roaming free which means that we have less control over campus which means that teachers who actually do come to work and try and give their all to the kids get spit on.

Tough day. A day when I saw/see/feel my breaking point.

We all leave our jobs at some point. Retire. Move up. Move on. This is not the way I want to go out but at some point, enough is enough.

They are paying me 3% less money this year to do more work than last year. And next year they are about to offer me up to 12% less money to do even more work next year. But are those the things that break me? Well, they push… no doubt.

But I am 43 years old. Does retaining a bit of personal dignity not, at some point, matter?

My wife was talking to some mothers the other day about public versus private school. She’s worked as a K-2 teacher in both settings for years and as I listened on, something she said really caught my ear.

Overall, she believed, administration at private schools were all about teaching to the top. Push it, set a rigorous pace and work your best students long and hard. That was the mantra. The rest will catch up — or at least follow along. Kids in private school, that’s what they do – top work. And this is what parents expect.

In public schools, she notes that it was all about the low end kids. Get them caught up. Raise the bottom. Sure, work to serve the middle and the high but the “top kids” they were not the ones who were to get the oomph. The ones who lacked the most were the ones that were supposed to be offered the most.

Private worked one way; public the other. Quite telling indeed.

–Which is right?
–Can both realistically be done?
–Can a school raise the bottom while simultaneously teaching to the top?
–Can a school teach to the top while simultaneously raising the bottom?

Theoretically, lots of folks — especially people running for some sort of political office –will say both can be done. But in practice, I am not sure I really see it accomplished all too often.

Me, I do believe — like my wife — that most schools choose and, whether it’s resources, intentions or merely the nature of the beast, it’s rare to find a campus that accomplishes excellence at both ends of the scale, for both the top and for the bottom. (Maybe excellence is too strong a word. Simple okay-ness might be a better word choice.) They either, as a campus, really do well by the top kids or, as a campus, spend a heck of a lotta time working to serve the “low” kids.

And doing that well is hard enough. Few of us really knock it out of the park on this front… or rather, I should say, not enough of our schools do.

And so, the question is, top or bottom?

Well, if you look at the way that NCLB rewards a school’s test score data, it’s a no brainer. Elevate the bottom and you are rewarded. That’s where all schools get the most bang for the buck. Seek out the lowest achievers and make them higher achievers. Do that and your scores go up.

Have the top kids perform at an even higher level and… you really will not see much of an increase.

Now Arne Duncan seems to realize this and has thus put forth Race to the Top. It’s a GREAT notion. However, unless they change the formula of evaluating our academic institutions, we’ll still see more schools look to the floor before the ceiling.

Which groups gets most of the dialogue around your campus?

You want the top or the bottom? Welcome to America’s bunk bed educational mentality.

Our latest problem is that kids are coming to school with Gatorade bottles… filled with vodka drinks. Does every next generation of teen have to take the level of prior “defiance” of school rules and cultures to a new level? I mean once upon a time it was unheard of to chew gum in class. Now kids are swigging berry martinis in the middle of math class making a mockery of, oh… just about everything.

Of course pot has been an issue forever. The other day I joked to a colleague that I taught on Weed Hall. Then again, as TIME Magazine points out, smoking wacky tabacky is up. (Though cigarettes are down.)

We don’t even have the budget to do small things like hire a school nurse, staff a school librarian, and so on… and now we need people to screen through all their Jonas Brothers lunch boxes? (That’s a joke — Megadeath, Slipknot, The Game and so much more how my students roll — boy bands get very little play around here.)

Really, think about the kid that comes onto campus with a Tequila cocktail. Do you think they also have their homework? Do they also have an eye towards being well-prepared for the SAT?

Are they not an inevitable anchor on our school test scores so that when NCLB slams us for being an “underperforming high school”? When folks blame our campus teachers for being a bunch of lame-O’s are we allowed to say, “Well, I tried to teach to the difference between literal vs. figurative language but my student was too sloshed from the rum and coke they sucked down at lunch?”

If we caught any of the teachers drinking on campus, they’d be fired in a heartbeat, their professional reputation tainted terribly forever. But the kids? They just get a few days of slap-on-the-wrist suspension where they — I assume — just go home and drink.

I mean it ain’t like we expect them to be doing homework, right?

Students: we want them to take a deep drink FROM THE WELL OF KNOWLEDGE. Some are drinking, but they are missing the point.

Is there such a thing as “bad” kids?

Walking the halls of school and chatting (as I get to do) with teachers from all over the country, I often hear the term “the good kids”. They are the ones that (this is my own, rough definition here; one I am drawing by assumption) come to class, behave in a civil manner, make an attempt to respect authority, do their work and strive for [so called] “admirable goals” like good grades, graduation, becoming well educated, going to college and so forth.

Good kids are, well… good kids. We all kind of understand who they are.

But if there are good kids, by definition, that must mean there are also “bad kids”, right? It really is a question I am not sure I know the answer to.

I mean, the bleeding heart California liberal in me wants to say, “There is no such thing as a bad kid.” And a part of me wants to truly believe that. I really do.

But to work in an urban, title I school you see kids that deal drugs, commits viscous acts of violence, show absolutely no regard for authority on campus, actively seek to destroy our school through vandalism, graffiti, and so on… and generally show absolutely no interest whatsoever in pursuing any academic aspirations whatsoever. To some kids, school is nothing more than a social venue where they get their kicks causing mayhem, chillin’ with friends and trying to score a little nooky from the hottie they just made eye contact with in the hallway.

And when other campus employees refer to them as the “bad kids” I often find myself biting my tongue. I mean I work hard not to label kids good or bad — in my book, kids are kids are kids and they vary along such a diverse continuum that there really is no way to generalize them with such imprecise vocabulary words. Yet… when other campus employees use the term “bad kids” and are referencing the type of students that demonstrate behaviors like the ones I just listed, is it really unfair of them to call these young people “bad kids”?

I wonder.

And if not, is there even such a thing as a “bad kid”?

Some folks will blame the parents of the child and talk about how they are being raised. Some people will blame the kids themselves for not acting more intelligently, responsibly, properly. Some people will blame the school and teachers for not being able to do a better job of reaching these students. However, this is a different discussion.

The question is, is there such a thing as a “bad kid” when you work at a school.

And are we ashamed to admit that “yes, there are” out of a fear that we will be transgressing some sort of “moral spirit of what a teacher ought to be” if we do indeed cop to the idea that some kids are just “bad”.

I have become a “dealer” to my kids. A pusher. A peddler of ill repute. I serve up scandalous interactions, tortuous emotional dealings, torrid affairs, dangerous lies, inspirational heartbreakers and flat-out back-stabbing.

The worse it gets, the better [sometimes].

Yep, I am The Campus Dope Man. And the drug I push: books.

Indeed, once the cherubic naifs are hooked, I do all I can to serve the needs of these little fiends until they blossom into full blown addicts.

Addicts for a lifetime! (Or so I hope.)

The funny thing is, the younger I get them started, the better I feel about matters. Middle school playgrounds? I have no shame. Elementary school classrooms? Even better. Pre-school… don’t even get me going on how much I love to weave an entrancing spell over these unsuspecting youngsters, seeking to instill deep in their minds the idea that they need stories.

That they need literature.

That they need books even more than they need oxygen itself!

Hhhmmrraahh! Hhhmmrraahh! Hhhmmrraahh! I say, twisting my mustache. I am molding minds.

And my scheme, it is working! Kids each year come in my room at the oddest of hours – during lunch, before school, when they ought to be in goodness-knows-whose class asking me, pleading with me, begging me to feed their little habits.

“You started this,” they’ll say. And like any proud kingpin, I keep a face full of stone but on the inside, I just kinda laugh.

“Yeah, I did, baybee. Yeah, I did.”

See, around my campus, my students know “Mr. Alan’s got the hook-up on books.” Part of it is because I get free books sent to me all the time. (Perks of being a writer, folks. I mean butchers get meat and bankers get free money so why should my line of business be any different?) Of course, I buy books as well. Loads of them.

Matter of fact, I am the type of person that currently has 11 books by my bedside, 3 more at school, 2 in the car in case I am ever stuck waiting somewhere and still, if I see something I even think I might want to read at some point, I buy it.

Essentially, I can’t read all the books I possess. But, in a weird way (the kind of weird way I oughtta talk to my therapist about — item number 673 on the list for 2010) I very much find emotional comfort in being surrounded by books.

However, I do love to share.

Today, I shared 13 Reasons Why and I shared The Hunger Games. No extra credit. No bonus at the end of the quarter. No reprieve from the other work we are doing in English class. I just shared.

Sometimes I share the books I have written. Othertimes, I share the ARC’s that other publishers send to me for early preview before titles even get released. Essentially, I share and I share and I share.

Yet, no matter what, it keeps ‘em coming back for more. That’s the rule of being a good dealer, right? First you give ‘em a taste. A free sample of the good stuff. And then you tell them, “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt you. Go ‘head, I think you’ll like it.”

Soon enough, they even find themselves spending their own money on the product.

Indeed, I am the Campus Dealer. Hhhmmrraahh! Hhhmmrraahh! Hhhmmrraahh!

Twist mustache. Twist mustache. Twist mustache.

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.

For years and years we have had an immense tardy problem on campus. Literally, the bell to start 1rst period would go BOING at 7:30 but if you stood at the front gate of school you would see hundreds — I mean HUNDREDS of students, not 10 or 20… like 300-400 — just kinda lazily sauntering in. Even at 7:38, you’d still see the same thing.

So me, I would go Draconian on my students. While the rest of the high school did whatever they did, a tardy to my class got you 1 warning and then meant 6 hours of Saturday school and 25 demerits. And if you were tardy twice within 2 weeks, I tripled the fine, 18 hours worth of Saturday School and 75 demerits. 3 seconds, 3 minutes or 30 minutes, all the same to me. Tardy is tardy.

Like I said, Draconian.

But it worked. While the rest of Lynwood High had kids who just sort of loafed without any sense of urgency to get to their classrooms, kids in my classes would literally run.

The fact is, you just can’t run a great operation if people think they can show up whenever they want. We start at the bell. And if I don’t enforce the rules, it makes folks who do show up on time look like suckers for having done so because there are no consequences.

Another reason I go so psycho on tardies is because it sets the tone for classroom management in regards to everything else I do. If they think I am a freak about being 18 seconds late to class, God only knows how bonkers he’s gonna go if we do things like tag up the walls in the room and nonsense like that, they think.

It’s the broken window theory as applied to behavior. And the truth is, it’s worked remarkably well. (NOTE: If you are not familiar with the broken window theory, read that link — it’s GREAT!)

Well, this year we have a new principal and he came to me asking about how to improve behavior during lunchtime and I told him, the problems didn’t start at lunch — they started first thing in the morning. I mean the message we are sending kids from the moment school starts is that, “Look, Lynwood High has rules but we don’t really enforce them too enthusiastically. So when it comes to behavior on campus, you get a lot of leeway. You can kinda do what you want.”

To wit, I said, look at all the tardies in the morning. Then I explained to him the broken window theory.

3 days later we started The Purple Crush. At the first bell — and each and every other tardy bell during the day — we do a huge sweep and all the kids that get caught up in it have to sit out on the bleachers for 119 minutes. (We are on block schedule.) No talking. No eating. No nothing. Just bleacher detention.

And let me tell you, it looks miserable.

The first 2 days we had scores of kids sitting in the bleachers moaning and hating life. Now, there’s but a handful. Kids stride purposefully towards class at 7:55. Teachers LOVE it! It’s changed the school. And what happens? Kids sent txt messages to the media and they do a story on The Crackdown. Check it out — IMHO, they kinda paint us as a bunch of unfair, tyrannical beasts that need to be reigned in like we are at the edge of violating The Bill of Rights.

Kids are going to class, the Purple Crush has improved our campus greatly and ABC News takes us to task. Geesh, can you ever win?

I pulled onto campus this morning to see a host of peers protesting layoffs, budget cuts and program slashing. Somehow, I missed the memo saying they’d be gathering but my heart dropped to the floor when I saw some of my closest friends on the “picket line” imploring the people of the community to demand that our schools do not get cast into an abyss from which it will be spectacularly hard to return.

Damn, it’s hard.

It’s hard for the teachers who got pink slips. It’s hard for the teachers (like myself) who did not get pink slips but know in their hearts that losing good people when you are in a battle like all of us are for the hearts and minds of the next generation is a deep, traumatic wound. It’s hard for the district administrators, too, who have to make supremely hard choices about where to slash, where to cut and where to forge ahead. (Goodness knows, I do not envy anyone having to make these tough choices… when you are forced to cut so deeply, nobody wins. That seems quite obvious.)

It’s getting ugly out there and the fact is, at the end of the day, lots of people are going to suffer. (Ultimately, no one more so than our students, though.) I want to more vocally advocate for the idea that we need to figure out a way for all of us to join together and NOT fall victim to the finger pointing, blame, hurt and hate that is so very much right at everyone’s fingertips right now, but when you didn’t just find out you lost your job, it’s easy to say because you don’t have to go home facing the prospects of unemployment. Truly, I don’t have credibility on that front.

Not being pink-slipped almost has me feeling survivor’s guilt — which makes it tough to do my work today. Really, just when you think the madness can’t get worse, it does.

We must find a way to fight through this. And I am sure we will. But it ain’t gonna be pretty.