So what is to be done when a student farts in class?

Hey, don’t laugh, this is a serious academic issue.

The way I see it, there are a coupla options.

1) Try to pretend it didn’t happen. Of course, if it’s stinky one, the boys sitting in and around the — let’s pretend I teach in a church — the boys sitting in and around the “pew” are gonna keep disrupting whatever progress you want to make in your lesson with commentary and insights about the aroma.

Of course, when you try to actually teach an ELA lesson on the need to use precise, descriptive, vibrant vocabulary in English class, you get papers back that lay flat and are filled with bland vanilla. But let a kid break wind and all of a sudden, the vocabulary being bandied about the room would make a lovelorn poet from the Romantic era proud of its richness and poignancy.

2) Scold the perpetrator. Now for me, this one would never work. First of all, I am still immature enough to find farts kinda funny so to actually try and castigate a kid would probably result in me cracking a smile in the middle of trying to keep a stern face. (Note: I think there is a fart joke in almost every book of young adult fiction I’ve yet written. And the new books that’ll be out next year, well… let’s just say it doesn’t look like the streak is in any danger of being broken right now.)

3) Pretend nothing actually happened and keep pressing on with the lesson. Probably the best route, when all is said and done, but meta-cognitively, an educator must know that for up to 180 seconds after student cheese-cutting, a teacher shouldn’t relay any truly valuable academic information — or else you will need to make a plan to re-teach it. After all, one good blasting of some backdoor breeze from a kid in class is enough to render even the most diligent of AP kids out of sorts for a while.

I guess the question I, as the teacher, have to really ask myself before I go down the road of condemnation for public flatulence is, to what end am I going to reprimand a student for this stuff? Am I going to send a kid to the Dean? Am I going to give the kid detention? Come on, let’s be honest, the more I keep the main subject of the classroom on student gas, the more tickled the kids are that we are 1) talking about this and 2) not talking about things like appositive phrases. I mean I have boys that would gladly engage in a 20 minute analysis on the type of wind currents able to be generated through the human digestive tract — the tone, the pitch, the pungency, the types of foods best suited to achieve optimum results — and if I were to give fart homework, I have a feeling my some of my most reluctant students would suddenly turn into verifiable scholars.

You want student engagement in the classroom? Try a Socratic Seminar on bottom blasts from the big brown horn. Guaranteed participation from all kinds of kids.

You want to teach vocabulary? Use farts. They’ll never forget the definition of turgidity again.

And not to be sexist, but how come I’ve never once had a freshman interrupt class with the declaration, “Ew, Kimberly farted!”

I get, “Ew, Michael farted!”
I get, “Ew, Joesph farted!”
I get, “Ew, both Michael and Joseph farted!”

But never the girls. Hmmm… worth more investigation.

The Conundrum of Student Farts… in my opinion, it’s an issue that needs more high level discussion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they are all being forced to choose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HA!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no way to work in a school today without the very clear recognition that the cracks are expanding. The question is, how do we prevent ourselves from cracking up amid the crumbling?

Kids used to just fall through cracks. But “kids”, at least as the phrase’s original connotation indicated to me, implied single kids (despite the use of the plural which I took to mean “one at a time.”) Or it meant a certain type of kid. It left one with the impression that a “kid falling through the cracks in the system” was an anomaly, a rare, but sad and regrettable bird, one that someone somewhere was diligently working to prevent in the future.

But nowadays, this expression has taken on (and is about to take on even more so) a whole new meaning.

Not just some kids, not just a bunch of kids, but many, many, many kids will fall through the cracks in the system in the next few years because the system is officially cracked and these budget cuts are taking a drill bit to the fault line.

For example, my own school district has forecast a projected 16 million dollar deficit after the operation of the 2009/2010 school year so something like 18% — 22% of our district’s teaching force was just pink slipped.

We’re still going to service roughly the same amount of kids, though. We’re just going to do it with 20% less educators (and a slashing of “fluff” classes like computers, art, music, and so on).

And all this as we face the oh-so-gentle stick of NCLB. Lest anyone forget, my high school is sinking towards Probation Level 4 in the DoE Circle of Educational Hell. I’m sure that less people actually trying to remediate our issues is going to help a heck of a lot, though. Wonder if they’ll take that into consideration when evaluating our bubble tests next year?

They raise the bar. They slash the resources to achieve the targets. Then they paint the people who work there as imbeciles who couldn’t teach a hungry monkey how to peel a banana.

I mean from my Superintendent on down to lil’ old me, what’s a fella to do? I know, I know, roll with the punches… but how many more punches can we all be expected to take before we are considered to be too punch drunk to soberly and successfully go about performing our jobs?

And it ain’t just Lynwood that is cracked. As this report states, nearly 60% of this Chicago school’s students will not be graduating from 8th grade, to the great shock of both the students and parents, of course. I mean I too could clearly see how my child was all beefed up on books and ready for Harvard but then voila, turns out she’s flunked 8th grade (along with the lion’s share of her peers) and here I was totally clueless about my kid’s — or her entire graduating class’s — performance. Totally believable.

Not that the school is above reproach, though. I’m sorry, but if 60% of your entire 8th grade is failing, guess what folks? The people working at the school are failing, too. Take some freakin’ ownership!

In that spirit, are Lynwood’s shortcoming my own fault as well? Absolutely. I must, if I am to accept any credit in the areas where we achieve, accept culpability for our shortcoming’s as well. After all, am I not my co-teacher’s keeper?

Usually, I’d crack a smarmy joke right about now in this point of the blog. Go for the smile with a small twist of the knife to boot. But guess what. These cracks are serious business and where the hell are our kids going to be in 3 years if we continue down this path.

Crack. It’s like we’re smoking it.

Teaching kids who are not motivated to learn wears on you. Sure, Hollywood movies make it all seem as if being in a job where a large amount of kids who are not motivated to participate in their own education simply requires one simple “epiphany” (either by the teacher or the students) in order to right the ship and send everyone off into a bright, bold and bountiful future… but the reality of it is much different.

Much.

It challenges you. It frustrates you. It makes you call into question why you even bother to do this kind of work. And anyone who does not pay heed to these ideas doesn’t know what it means to be on the front lines, what it means to be working in a school with an outrageous dropout rate… what it means to try and care more about a kid’s education more than the kid (or the parent of the kid) does themself.

To take liberties with an old cliche’, “You can lead a student to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.”

Indeed there are days where I feel like the Pied Piper, where no matter what I do with a class of students, they are on the bus, all in, eager, excited and fired up to go push our boundaries into a whole host of new, exciting intellectual directions.

But there are scores of kids who just don’t play ball floating through our American schools. Their attendance is horrible, their homework is non-existent and their sense of actually wanting to take an active role in their own education is horrifically low. And then, when they show up at the end of the year, having missed 8 of the 14 prior days of class, without even attempting to give a half-hearted effort at turning in a final project, what do you do?

It wears on you.

I’ve already spent so many of the arrows in my quiver. I’ve yelled. I’ve cajoled. I’ve been soft and cut slack and I’ve been firm and drawn lines in the sand. I’ve tried to get other people at school to join forces, I’ve made attempts to work with parents… what more is there to do? 7 days of school left and there is no way for this kid not to get an F… and I am sure that my class is not the only one like this for this student.

And then NCLB comes in and paints me and my school district as if it’s our fault that these kids are under-performing.

Is it the dentist’s fault when a patient gets a cavity?

Am I really supposed to take away a kid’s cell phone from them? I mean official school policy says NO CELL PHONES.

Yet virtually very kid on campus has one. And they make no bones about the fact that their phones are more than just phones — their phones are central conduits to how they live their lives.

To take away their cell phone makes me an instant jerk. And who is going to allow themselves to actually listen to and learn from a total jerk?

On the other hand, school’s cannot function without rules. Simply put, it’d be anarchy. Chaos. Pandemonium!(Not so unlike how it is now anyway, right?)

But rules are essential. A classroom without procedures, guidelines, and matters of protocol is a classroom that is going to implode.

So, does this mean school rules are optional, that I get to follow the ones that make sense to me and disregard teh ones that do not?

Well, if you ask my principal, my district superintendent or anyone at the state department of education, most certainly not.

But if you ask a teacher down the hall, a frontline soldier who has to actually work where the rubber meets the road, you are going to get an entirely different answer.

And you know what? Both sides are 100% right! That’s what so maddening about public education today. School boards and administration need to set policy and that policy needs to be followed in order for campuses to function. Otherwise, it’s a disaster.

But teachers who blindly follow non-sensible policies do so to the detriment of their kids… and that’s an even worse disaster.

So, do I confiscate the phone? If I do, I lose the kid. If I don’t, I am yet another rebel teacher who doesn’t buy into sending the kids one straightforward, unmixed message about matters of behavior on campus. I am the guy who clearly puts it out there that school rules are optional, subjective, dependent on individual circumstances and not really rules, but more like guidelines, take them or leave them.

Kids wear hats. It’s a violation of school policy. I never take a kid’s hat. Why? Because I care more about what’s going on underneath the hat.

Kid’s have face piercings. Like I really want to extract a nosering from a teenager’s nostril in the middle of 3rd period.

Kids bring drugs to school. I bust them with these — and I bust them… and good.

Weapons, too.

Spray paint cans, too.

But girls who wear shorts that are not quite to fingertips length down their sides? Whatever, I have other battles to wage.

And so I wonder, without any sort of real answer to this question, are school rules subjective and open to teacher interpretation?

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?

There are many parts to the educational equation and if any of them are out of balance or not functioning well, all the balls that are in our academic air risk tumbling. Here’s a Top Ten List of What We Need in order to be effective as an American institution.

We need good teachers.
Simply put, it’s absolutely beyond refute that America needs high quality teachers leading our classrooms. The data proves it, the kids know it and only someone who is trying to sell you something would try to diminish the importance of an awesome educator at the front of the room.

We need students who are open and hungry to learn.
Give me a kid who is eager to learn and I can teach them how to punctuate an appositive phrase. Give me a kid who ditches class, shows up unprepared (or on drugs or seething with anger from emotional issues in other areas of their life which are eating their soul) and I am going to struggle to get that kid to do squat, just like most every other teacher there is. You can lead a student to water, but you can’t make them think.

We need parents to be involved.
Parent involvement can take a vareity of forms. Providing a quiet space for homework, storming to Board Meetings to advocate for the students, reading to toddlers so that they come to school with a few fundamental literacy schools, showing up to Back to School Night, and so on. But parents who cede the education of their children to public education with a “now go teach my kid” mentality are leaving a void no one in a child’s life other than a parent can really fill. To our credit, schools will try… but we often will not be very successful.

We need administration to properly support us.
I know a heck of a lot of administrators and the truth is, they are being kicked and worked over and abused about as badly as anyone in the world of our schools. While teachers get cut slack in some corners of the world (i.e. he’s a great math teacher, she really is a wizard at getting those kids to learn science) administrators are so often the punching bag of almost everyone. That being said, they need to support us, empower us and take a step back and let us do our jobs as if we really were professionals. Micro-managing and hyper-legislating a classroom from an ivory tower (or cubicle without a window) simply doesn’t work. The best administrators I know view teachers as an ally. The worst view us as the problem, an enemy, an unruly gaggle of tenured miscreants that need to be tamed.

We need kids to be in possession of certain skill sets before they come to our classrooms.
Is it just me, or should kids not be expected to know their multiplication tables before they show up to an Algebra 1 class? Or how about knowing how to indent a paragraph before, say, high school English class? Social promotion is a policy which is failing our nation. We need gatekeeping and we need checkpoints and if kids do not have a certain set of skills in 4rth grade and then 8th grade, they should not be granted access to 9th grade because chances are too low that those who are deficient in both 4rth and 8th will ever graduate and we are trying to do too much recovery work in high school when the opportunity to be more effective avails itself to us much earlier on in the process of public schooling.

We need the community to support our schools.
When is the last time our business leaders actually came into the local schools and said, “How can I help?” I mean, they are the folks who are going to need the talent a few years out we are currently nurturing. Internships, mentorships, and so on. It’s not money we’re asking for — though that’d be nice as well — but the currency of their intellect is valuable and sharing it with the local kids would go a heck of a long way.

We need the politicians to make intelligent policy.
Do I need to even address this point? I mean we see how the policies of Dubya have taken schooling into a dark and dreary place. Politicians matter — and it’s really tough to admit that since they are so problematic in so many ways to try and support.

We need great teaching materials.
Handing out 5 pound books six times over to kids during the first week of school (and then measuring their intellectual growth through inane bubble tests) is the foremost means by which we “educate” many of today’s kids. Throw both of those two things away and then let’s see how far we go, that’s what I say. But whether you believe that last statement or not, it’s simply a sad fact of life these days that most teachers are being provided with low quality materials. Great chefs use great cookware. Teachers are, by and large, being given crappy tools. We need to reinvent our teaching materials because many of them are simply not effective. (And isn’t that the ultimate barometer of a tool?)

We need reasonably sized classes.
Ever try teaching at 41 to 1? There’s not a person in the world who can sell me the argument that class size does not matter. 20 to 1 versus 40 to 1 is an immense difference and if you extrapolate it out over the course of either an educator’s career or a student’s trip through our school system, there is little doubt that the numbers will not add up to favor the student/teacher who gets to operate in a world of smaller classrooms. Not that all these layoffs are really going to matter or anything, though.

We need safety on campus.
Without discipline, without order, without a sense that school can be a place where students are not fearful of their own physical and emotional safety, we are fools to think any real between the ears strides are going to be made in our classrooms. Kids who are worried about being jumped in the halls don’t concentrate in class. This is probably the greatest difference between so called high achieving schools and low ones: the levels of violence on campus. Without safety, kids will not academically perform at a consistently high level and we are lying to ourselves if we believe that our lowest performing schools are not also our most violent houses of learning. Without discipline on campus a school can’t function. Without discipline in a classroom an educator can’t really teach. Schools need to feel like places where the adults are in charge — not the kids.

Well, that’s 10. I have a feeling I could find a few more. (Love to hear other thoughts.)

Oh, BTW, this is not in any kind of order.

I don’t think it’s any great Einstein-ian insight to say that public education is dependent on the community in many, many ways. And when the community surrounding and supporting public education is dysfunctional, flawed, lacking, and so on, it’s really hard to be productive, excellent, amazing and wonderful in our classrooms.

Not that it can’t be done, but it becomes exceptionally challenging.

It’s almost self-evident that the first ally in our aim to excellently educate the students of this country is always the parents. For a kid that comes to first grade knowing how to write their name, read, identify letters, shapes, colors and has been socialized to working in classroom environments by having attended pre-school, teachers and schools can be rightfully expected to well educate that child. However, for the kid who did not have the “at home” pre-instruction to instruction, the kid who can’t write their name, doesn’t read a lick, struggles with elementary numbers and has no b.g. with books nor has been socialized yet to the demands of working well in a classroom environment, our schools are just not set up well to serve that kid — especially when mixed with other kids that are both above and below their individual level.

And then, as these students move up in grade level, the gap in skills and competencies — as all the data shows — grows and grows.

So yes, we need institutional change and yes, “there is something fundamentally flawed with the structure, management and compensation of the labor force in the public education system,” as was mentioned in another post on this ning but school readiness and community support are adding fuel to the fire and lots of us are quite sick of the fact that we’re viewed as if it’s all “our dysfunctional fault” that public education is in the state it is in.

We need better support! No matter how we are organized or re-organized, until we are better supported by the parents and community we are going to be extremely hard-pressed to meet our objectives because this lack of support is very much a weight on our back, an almost insurmountable albatross in many ways. Without real support from outside the school walls and halls, it’s spectacularly difficult to create the kind of wholesale change we’d all like to see. Sure, anomalies and success stories will always disprove any sweeping stereotypes but on the whole, turning around Washington DC, Oakland, Philly, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and so on is going to take the communities of Washington DC, Oakland, Philly, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and so on. Without the parents, without the local business owners, without the support of the alumni and the local governments, schools are going to be hard pressed to achieve the results that we all want to see.

When Barack said “parents” during the campaign, he knew exactly what he was talking about. We need the parents to be more involved, dedicated and committed.

I work hard NEVER to give up on a kid. NEVER. But my school sports about a 45% dropout rate and sometimes it makes me bananas when I have students who are so clearly on the wrong path… and refuse to help themselves before their lives derail and they end up leaving this institution without a degree.

It’ll make a teacher go loony.

Let’s call her Debbie. (Trust me, her name’s NOT Debbie.) Smart. Social. Outgoing. Vibrant. Missed an entire week of school last week, 4 of the previous 11 days prior to that and comes into class today without even bothering to offer up an excuse as to why she was out. Nor does she approach me to ask for make-up work. Just sits down, bombs on an assignment and knows she’s lost but also knows that school is like whatever to her. She’s lying to herself, telling herself she’s trying but everyone in her life knows she’s not.

I’ve tried being nice, being blunt, talking with calm and common sense, and flipping out — nothing gets through to this student. She is SO CLEARLY on her way out… and she’s only 14 years old. A freshman.

And while she says she cares, her actions show that she does not. I’ve called her house (no answer; no return call) spoken to the guidance counselor, conferred with other teachers — no one can get through. If Debbie is here at the start of her Junior year, I’ll be amazed.

And the thing is, I have so many other kids to teach, so many other students that want to learn, so many other folks who need what I do, want what I have to offer, willingly embrace the things I am trying to teach them that the question enters my head, “At what point is Debbie someone I can no longer deeply toil over?”

On one hand, there is the school of thought that says, “You can’t give up on this kid.” However, for people who do not actually teach for a living in an urban school, that sentiment is MUCH HARDER than you think. I mean how do you make a horse drink once you lead it to water?

Having said that, if I give up on Debbie, it’s a slippery slope. Cause then I’ll give up on Max and Tom and Cindy and Jennie at some point, too, right? Giving up is Pandora’s box and once it’s opened… well, we know how that story goes.

So Debbie fails, Debbie won’t buy in, Debbie seems to be having a heck of a fun life (though deep down, it’s obvious she’s sad, self-destructive and could probably use counseling — but funds for that dried up eons ago and America’s willingness to finance public education and all its various components to the extent America ought to is self-evident).

So what does a teacher like me do? If this were Hollywood, the miracle solution to all this kid’s ills would pop into my head, the music would swell and we’d cut to an inspirational montage of Debbie doing her homework, Debbie in the library, Debbie high-fiving me as she shows me an A on her math exam. (Because, of course, once I get through, she’ll improve in ALL of her classes and not just mine.)

But this ain’t Hollywood. This is what I face. I can’t give up on Debbie but I don’t seem to be getting through. And like I said, I have to move on because there are scores of other kids to teach.

Oh yeah, bubble tests that measure the effectiveness of our school are coming up soon. Hmm, I wonder how Debbie is gonna do?