I just got a message from Arne Duncan. An email actually. Here’s what he sent to me:

As our nation observes Teacher Appreciation Week, I am pleased to send this message to recent Teachers of the Year, to make sure that you know how much we at the U.S. Department of Education value your extraordinary commitment and service to our nation’s students.

All teachers deserve honor and thanks on a daily basis for all they do to nurture their students’ academic and personal growth, help them to achieve, and prepare them for the future.

Teachers of the Year admirably represent the entire teaching profession, and I am especially grateful for the leadership and good examples they provide.

I salute you for all of your accomplishments, and I thank you for your enduring dedication to America’s students.

–Arne Duncan

At first, I thought it was a hoax. I thought I was going to open the email and POOF! my computer was going to disintegrate while an evil teen cackled from half-way across the world screaming, “I hate and am not liking subject verb agreement always!”

But alas, it really was from Mr. Duncan. And then, once my initial cynicism subsided, I realized, “Hey, that was pretty cool. Nice gesture, Mr. Secretary of Education.”

I mean the guy obviously can’t be everywhere doing everything trying to meet everyone. But at least he wrote me an email.

Or had a secretary write it.

Or ordered a secretary to have an intern write it.

Or ordered a secretary to have an intern who had a mother who was once a teacher write it. (Look at the proper use of those apostrophes… you know that if you’re gonna send an email out to teachers, as Secretary of Education, you better get both Strunk and White to sign off on that bad boy! However, I think I could take issue with his parallelism if I were to get persnickety but alas, he’s a busy guy so I am not gonna hit him with the fine tooth comb.)

Arne, I agree with you on one hell of a big point: our schools need to change. And I do salute the fact that you are a person who believes that if you’re going to make an educational omelet, you gotta break some schoolhouse eggs. (BTW, if you ever need a fire and brimstone speechwriter, I can be bought!)

Now of course, I might quibble over the eggs you are choosing to smash – or not choosing, as well (like bubble tests!) – yet, at the end of the day, I think the jury is still out on you. Being that you’re still relatively new at the job, and still learning the ropes, I think you deserve more time before you become the next marshmallow on my blogfire.

And you’ve done some good already as well. Those coupla billion you scrounged up to keep the universe afloat while Wall Street was playing 3 card monty with our national banking system really did prevent a calamity.

Yet, we ain’t out of the woods yet. Please don’t forget that.

All in all, thanks for the note last week – and right back at ya, Dude! Teacher of the Year wnners do work hard. But please know that there are hundreds of thousands of teachers in California and millions of teachers across the country that would really like to feel your love as well.

Now sure, some teachers stink and should be run from the profession, but their numbers are infinitesimal as compared to the number of those who simply do right by America. Remember, more time out of the Beltway will always be a good thing to show you just that. And if you want to come to Lynwood, we’d love to have you.

Oh yeah, feel free to bring Barry, too. It’ be a genuine honor.

So for those of you who do not know, 420 became a slang term for smoking weed back in the 1970′s. There’s actually a really interesting – and funny – article here for those who want to learn a bit about the “history” of the invention of this name.

Tuesday was April 20th… i.e. 4-20.

Colleges struggle with students showing up at 4:20 p.m. on 4-20 to smoke a blunt and then go back to whatever it is that college kids do at 4:21 when they are stoned out of their minds.

Thousands and thousands of college kids do this, mind you… all across the nation.

But attendance on Tuesday was down in my classes/at my school on Tuesday, April 20th. And why?

When I innocently asked Tuesday, after taking role, “Where is everyone today?” one of my kids said, “Do you know what day it is?”

I do… but I didn’t put it together until then. (It was still early in the morning and I don’t really think like a 420 disciple.)

And being that we are on block schedule, I see my kids every other day. That means that on Thursday I will see the Tuesday absentees… and when I do see them, won’t I also be seeing them in a new light? I mean, I know kids smoke pot – I smell it in the halls quite often. However, ditching school to honor the Gods of Ganja?

For those kids on the fence for grades, don’t I now become all the more less likely to “cut ‘em some slack”?

Of course, I might end up wrongly assuming that Kid X was off getting high on Tuesday when they were home with a sore throat (from too many BONG LOADS!) but the fact is, how can my own assessment lens not be at least slightly tainted by such blatant ditching to go get blazed?

Besides, I took role well before noon. 420 doesn’t begin til 4:20.

Don’t pot smoking teens even know how to tell time anymore? School ends at 3:00 p.m. Why miss a class that ended well before 10:00 a.m.?

I know, I know… 420, Dude.

420

Arrrgghh!

Why I wrote The Hoopster

Let’s be honest. To a certain extent, we are raising a generation of non-readers. I hate to sound like an old coot but these kids today with their computers, their iPods, their cell phones and their video games, they are just not reading as much as they used to anymore. It’s as if Guttenberg never lived.

And the consequences are dire.

(Okay, I’ll concede that kids today are Screen-Agers. Yes, they are reading their screens all the time in a literal way but it’s not the type of reading that promotes critical thinking. It’s like eating Doritos for dinner. Yes, it’s food but it most certainly lacks vital nutrition and if salty chips are all you eat your health is most assuredly going to suffer.)

Goodness, I don’t even know who I’d be if I hadn’t read some of the books that I have in my life. And many adults, I realize, feel exactly same way.

Quick activity: List your top two or three favorite books of all time… and then X them out, as if you had never read them. Ask yourself, who would you be if you had never read these works? For me I can say without reservation that I’d be much worse off as a human being without these books in my life. From Dr. Seuss to Victor Hugo to the Bible to Walter Dean Meyers, I mean it’s almost unimaginable who I’d be without these texts.

This realization is what led me to write The Hoopster. Knowing how immense the positive impact of one simple book could be to the lives of my students – and knowing how valuable it is in this day and age to be literate and be a reader – well, that’s what got my juices going. I wanted my students to read books.

And I wanted to be the one to write “that book”, the one that would turn them on to reading and make them realize, “This is cool!”.

Heck, it had always been a secret dream of mine to become an author, a dream that I had somehow put on hold as I got older, took a job, got married, blah, blah, blah.

It was at this juncture of my life that I realized I was being confronted by my own hypocrisy.

I mean I spend my whole life telling people to go after their dreams, to reach for the stars, to not let anything hold them back from striving for the brass ring and yet here I was with a dream of my own and I wasn’t going to go for it? The irony was just too thick and I knew I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t at least made an effort.

So I set to work.

I outlined. I plumbed the depths of character. But really, my whole aim was to simply gain the approval of teenage boys – particularly teenage boys of color, the hardest to reach demographic of all. (Hey, why no shoot for the moon, right?) I mean these were the kids sitting in the chairs of my classroom anyway. I wasn’t writing for the critics. I was writing for a much tougher crowd. To gain the approval of multicultural middle and high school boys.

Now that would be the motherload!

Action. Suspense. Humor. Heart. I flexed every literary muscle I could. And then I handed my novel to Dontae.

“Yo Dontae, Man,” I said in a sort of California-causal way. “I wrote this book for folks like you and your boys. Would you mind checkin’ it out?”

I handed him the manuscript.

“Yeah, sure I’ll check it out, Mr. Alan,” he replied.

A day passed. Nothing.

Two days passed. Nothing.

A week went by.

You know how when you are waiting to hear feedback from someone about something and you start to get all itchy? Let’s just say it felt like I was wearing a wool sweater knit by a fat aunt with bad teeth and lots of caked-on make-up. At day 10, I cornered Dontae in the hall. (Obviously, maturity and patience are not my greatest strengths.)

“Yo Dude,” I said trying not to sound like an addict fiending for a fix. “Remember that book I gave you? Did you even read the first page?”

Dontae looked up at me with innocent teenage eyes, the kind of eyes that always remind teachers why working with kids is the most fulfilling type of job on the planet there is.

“Aw yeah, Mr. Alan,” Dontae said in a relaxed tone of voice. “I read it in two days. And then I gave it to Richard and he read it and gave it to Joel. I hope that’s cool.”

I paused, stunned.

Oh my goodness. They’re bootlegging my book around the school.

“Uh, yeah, Dontae, that’s cool,” I said, unsure of how to respond.

“Yo, when you gonna write another, Mr. Alan. Beats that boring shi… I mean stuff in the library.”

“Uh, I’ll get back to you, Dontae.”

And that’s how The Hoopster was born.

Are we hiding something? Really, are we?

Because let me be the first to call it like it is — when it comes to the conversation about teacher effectiveness, I think I am secretly harboring an inferiority complex about my own deficiencies to do this job of being a teacher… at least to do it in a manner that is beyond reproach.

And I don’t want other people to know about it.

And I certainly do not want this information revealed to my bosses. Why? Because I don’t sense that they are sympathetic to all the challenges, hurdles and generally unreasonable demands that are being placed on me.

Come on, I can’t turn water into wine. And yet, in a way, that’s what I am being asked to do when you take all the mitigating factors into consideration. Amazingly, I do pretty well at it — at times, that is. Let’s just say that some days are way better than others.

However, I certainly don’t feel that “measuring my effectiveness” is going to take all of the “peripheral issues” and “extenuating circumstances” into account and ultimately, I think that politicians are just going to use whatever information they glean from “measuring my effectiveness” to shame me and try to make me worker harder, work longer, and do it all for less money with less resources.

So am I hiding something when it comes to being transparent about measuring my effectiveness as a teacher?

I tell you this, my natural reflex is to want to hide. To want to cover up. To want to close my door and only seek the solace and company and empathy that someone else in like circumstances can understand.

Other teachers get me. Politicians, I feel, do not. Therefore, when they say they want to measure me, I recoil and think, “Up yours, Dude… you are the one who captained this ship to the rocks and now you want to blame the people rowing.”

So, is measuring teacher effectiveness even possible? Well first, for me to really play ball with this whole idea, I am going to have to trust the process.

That is the one of the first “hows” when it comes to measuring teacher effectiveness. The teachers must feel as if we are going to be given a fair shake, we must feel that our evaluations are going to be taken in proper context as opposed to being viewed through myopic, unfair prisms, and we must feel that we have been properly and fairly represented at the table when the rules of what constitutes this measurement is made.

And with NCLB being your latest foray into education policy, you are already starting behind the eight ball buddy. I have emotional baggage right now and let’s be honest, as an educator I am a tarnished, not a clean, slate.

And you are the one who tarnished me. I want to believe — really I do. But fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…

Let’s face it, I am at a HUGE disadvantage when it comes to names.

First off, there are about a ba-zillion new ones I need to learn. This always takes a lot of effort and a few weeks. Kids, they have about 6-10 new names they must learn at school at the start of a new year — the names of their new teachers. Me, I have scores and scores and scores of them I must learn.

It’s a challenge every year… learn all the names as fast as you can. However, at least I learn them!!

See, I just realized I used the word “must” above. However, as other teachers often prove to me, what I find to be a “must” is not really a “must” when it comes to public education. I mean how many teachers are there out in our school systems this year that will just never even bother to learn all their students’ first names? (More than you think, that’s for sure.)

They just simply put kids into alphabetical seating order and spend the rest of the year looking at their charts to see who is who — but they don’t really know the kids. Wouldn’t know what to call them if they saw them at lunch or in the halls or what not. And let’s face it — the kids know when you do not know their names.

This is why I view learning the names of my students as a must — because how in the world can you expect to be an effective educator if you do not even know your students’ names?

Even if there are 43 kids in your 2nd period class (with only 36 desks)?

(Those are rhetorical questions, BTW… you really can’t, IMHO.)

So I learn names. All of them.

However, I still haven’t figured out a way to handle remembering the names of all my former students. I mean, I teach teenagers and these kids change and grow and lose their braces and cut their hair and pierce their faces and color their hair and gain weight and lose weight and on and on an on.

So when a semi-quiet kid I had 2 years ago in 4rth period who has become taller by 2 inches, grown a mini-mohawk, gotten contact lenses and is now deeply into goth comes up to me and says, “Hi Mr. Alan,” a bit of a deer-in-the-headlights look sometimes crosses my face. I mean I know I remember the kid… I just don’t quite remember their name.

It’s that tip-of-the-tongue thing that never comes.

And they sense it. And they take it personally. And I feel bad. But I am struggling with names in the month of September. Struggling badly. My focus is more on learning new ones than recalling old ones anyway and the fact is, I think the memory card between my ears has storage space limitations that inhibit me from remembering any more than I already do.

I mean how many names can a teacher possibly be expected to recall?

For example, I betchya that last year in the month of June I knew the first names of 500 people on campus. Kids, teachers, administrators… yep, 500 seems like a solid guess. And yet, there were probably at least 1,000 people that new my name if not more. (We were over 4,000 at our high school in enrollment, or thereabouts.)

But do I get any credit for the ones I remember? Nope… but I feel terrible for the ones I forget.

Never mind the fact that I have 4 Juans, 5 Marias and two students named Jesus this year (one’s a boy and one’s a girl — go figure). It’ll all make a person bonkers.

So what do I do when I get hit with a former student saying, “Hi, Mr. Alan”?

I play the “Uhm, Hey… Dude” Name Game.

But if there’s a better way, I’d love to hear about it.

Another student of mine came back from suspension today.

“Hey Zeke,” I asked. “Tell me, why’d you get suspended?”

“Fighting.”

Zeke is an A student in 1rst period, a good kid. Sure, he dressed like every other kid in California. Wore a hoodie sweatshirt, clothes with some giant brand names on them, baggy pants and an occasional baseball cap. But underneath the clothes (and who among us should ever be judged by our clothes?) was a solid student who wrote well, read all the books I’d assigned, possessed a good work ethic and had a nice, soft-spoken demeanor. Thus my next question.

“You got into a fight?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Right out in the hall at lunch.”

“Dude, you couldn’t just walk away? You’re smarter than that,” I said.

“Naw, Mr. Alan,” he answered. “See a dude was messin’ with me. Him and his friends. And the dude challenged me to go one-on-one right there.”

“Like I said, just walk away,” I repeated.

“Naw, that ain’t how it is, Mr. Alan. See his boyz said that if I didn’t go one-on-one right there then they’d all jump me.”

“Jump you? When?”

“Whenever they could catch me. In the halls. At lunch. After school. I didn’t have a choice.”

I paused. In a way, it’s true. He didn’t have a choice. I mean coming to an adult to “snitch” on a kid for threatening to beat you up isn’t how problems get solved in the real world for students in America’s schools today. Doing that just seems to make matters worse for kids, not better. Of course, I wish it wasn’t that way, but if Zeke had come to me, could I really protect him? Could security? Could the community? Nope. He knew it and I knew and we all know it. Zeke was a boy faced with a man’s decision: either stand up for yourself in the face of tyranny or live in fear with much worse consequences to be meted out later if ever you get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Is it squashed?” I asked wondering if the one-on-one fight put an end to it.

“Yep,” he answered. “We went one-on-one, got busted by security, I got suspended, and now it’s over.”

Zeke was back in class working towards keeping up his grades. The other boys, I have no idea. And what did it all start over. I didn’t even ask because really, what did it matter. Some boys just like to fight and pick on the weak.

“All right, just try to keep safe, okay dude,” I said to Zeke.

And then he looked at me and we made eye contact. His face had a simple resolution to it, a resigned, matter of fact, this-is-the-way-it-is for kids like me look. And though he didn’t say it, I knew he was thinking it.

“What else could I have done?”

And when he walked back to his desk, I asked myself, “And what would you do, Mr. Alan, if the tables were turned?” Does a kid like Zeke really have a choice but to fight?

Just another day at the office, right?