We are always teaching our students. Even when we are not teaching, we are teaching our students. In fact, when we are not teaching is probably when we are most teaching because kids often learn by adult example.

So what is the example you set from the front of the room?

It’s pretty well known that scores of secondary educators in this country will be showing fluff movies over the course of the last few weeks of the school year.

Doesn’t that teach kids a whole lotta stuff we’d really rather not have them learn?

BTW, I am not talking about showing a film like Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful to cap a unit on Holocaust studies. (Trust me, I love the cinema.) But I am quite wary of showing The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift… in Math Class!

So let’s look at some of the things kids learn when two teachers approach the end of the year from different perspectives.

Teacher X (TX) shows fluff movies and does silly worksheets because they are counting down the days to summer and just can’t wait to head for the door.

Teacher Y (TY) works ‘em to the end trying to make the most out of classroom minutes over the course of the last few weeks of school but yes, still likes the idea of summer and is excited to take a break as well.

Things that TX is teaching by means of personal example:

• I don’t care if you learn anything else.
• This school doesn’t have the means to control me and prevent me from having a bad attitude/shortchanging you. (“Welcome to the real world, punk!”)
• Professionalism when you are a teacher, matters little.
• I only pay lip service to the phrase, “Your education matters.”
• Who says surfin’ ebay doesn’t pay? I am collecting full wages right now.
• You’ll be out of my hair soon enough.

Things that TY is teaching by means of personal example:

• I don’t just talk the talk up here, I walk the walk and in life, you’ll come to discover, this matters a great deal.
• It doesn’t matter whether or not this school has the means to control me… I am still going to carry myself as if I were a professional and do my job in the best manner I know how – as I have been asking you to do all school year long.
• Habits of quality are not faucets to be turned on and off. You can’t just flip a switch in life. If you want to be excellent at something, you must always strive to be excellent – otherwise you will not be.
• Learning doesn’t end so why would you ever assume there’s nothing more we should try to tackle in class before we take a summer break?

Obviously, there are so many more things we could add to each of these lists but what seems self evident is that if we really want to forge better character in our kids, we have to exemplify it ourselves via our deeds and not our language.

Phoning it in doesn’t mean you are not teaching; you are teaching things most parents would probably rather not have their kids learn from you.

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

How much should I, as a teacher, be expected to do between 8:00 a.m and 3:00 p.m.?

And don’t those expectations change depending on what is going on between 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. in a student’s life?

Some kids come into my room ready to learn. With the tools to learn.

And some don’t.

Some need me to be play the role of their parent, their advisor, their taskmaster, their shoulder to cry on, and so on.

Others just need me/want me to be their “English teacher”. (And by that I mean the person who guides them in skills pertaining to advancing their abilities in the realm of Language Arts: reading literature, writing, discussing philosophy, applying 21st century skills, that sort of thing.)

If I only take on the role of being their “English teacher” (as I define it above), am I being derelict in my duties?

If I take on more than the job of being their “English teacher” am I over-stepping my boundaries?

I don’t know. And worse, I am not sure where I can turn for a credible answer.

After all, the state standards, those things I have been hired to teach (and which are supposed to instruct me), speak nothing of showing empathy for a student who, for example, just learned their favorite uncle was sent to prison for a decade. (A recent event in my teaching day.) On the other hand, if I allow this event to be an excuse which exempts the student from working in class, where does that leave me?

This is what is so silly about bubble tests: they do not take into account the ingredients which make up the stew. They just assess the stew… and then the finger gets pointed at teachers as if we are the only chefs contributing.

In fact, I’d say while we can most certainly be one of the most important contributors, we’re not number one. Not by a long shot.

What goes on between 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. in a student’s life greatly dictates what goes on between 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. ( I gotta give a shout-out to JoAnne for raising this point in response to a previous blog post of mine!)

And anyone who tries to tell you that it doesn’t is trying to sell you something. And in my opinion, none of this is “excuse making” as some hard-liners would have you believe.

To the hard-liners, I think karma should give them a migraine headache and see if they can perform their job at the same ability as they would without the migraine.

That’ll learn them some compassion for “mitigating factors in performance”.

BTW, Happy Cinco de Mayo! And for those of you who can expect low attendance on either May 5th (getting a jump on the partying!) or on May 6th (too much partying to get to class), remember, the bubble tests don’t care… so STEP UP!

This weekend Stephen Hawking talked aliens… and the world perked up its collective ears.

First off, he finds the probability of the existence of “extraterrestrial life forms” to be highly likely. I’ve felt this way for a long time. With so much “out there” how we can we possibly be all alone in the universe? (Heck, we can’t even define the parameters of our universe much less say for sure no other life forms exist.)

And don’t we disprove almost daily (if you watch the evening news) the idea that human beings are the most intelligent form of life in the galaxy?

I am how pathetic of a galaxy are we living in? Goodness, I am hoping that we’re not the tops because if we are, we are eventually going to encounter some real idiot aliens one day.

Idiot aliens would, of course, be gullible enough to come in peace. Not to be a skeptic, but I really feel that would end badly for either one party or the other.

If aliens really came in peace, we’d end up capturing them and studying them and trying to “learn” something from them and then they’d be sad and bummed out that they ever stopped by our planet, sitting in their little sterilized glass cages while our best and brightest tried to dissect them under the auspices of advancing humanity.

It’d be a regular “break your heart to watch” calamity, like watching baby seals get clubbed or something.

“Stay away, Aliens! Stay away!” I say. When we beamed out that Beatles song asking you to come in peace if you ever were to come what we really wanted was you not to, as Stephen Hawking suggests, colonize and enslave us for your own nefarious aims.

But if you are not going to colonize us and enslave us for your own nefarious aims, then heck, we’re probably gonna do that to you.

Like I said, “Stay away, Aliens! Stay way.”

If you know what’s good for you, I say stay away.

(BTW, if you spend too much time on our planet, we’re gonna make you take bubble tests. Fair warning, dudes.)

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.

I think I’ve spoken before about how, as a writer, I spent years and years and years knocking out material only to be rejected and rejected and rejected.

I used to think, back then, that it was a sign of my own weakness, my moral shortcomings, my inability to be articulate and disciplined and witty and engaging and a good storyteller and so on. Essentially, I used to think that being rejected as a writer was a negative.

These days I realize how wrong I was.

Yes, being rejected hurts. Being rejected humiliates. Being rejected stings in a deep way that only someone who really lays it all on the line and then hears “Sorry Charlie, no thanks,” can understand. The “owch-factor” is brutal.

Matter of fact, the owch-factor is probably why so few people actually ever really attempt to reach for their dreams in this world… cause coming up short can be way more painful than not ever having tried at all because then you can always tell yourself, “I could have if I tried.” Which is Bullshit! btw.)

Of course, these days I am much more philosophical about rejection. Sure, it helps that I am now under contract for my tenth published book aside from having captained an immense curriculum project that represents the best teaching I have ever done. Plus, nowadays all kinds of major publishers are eager to work with me. Truly, I am one of the lucky ones. (And I work hard not to forget it.)

However, rejection is a giver of wisdom once you can learn to put your own feelings of having your ego bruised aside. Rejection teaches things. (BTW, I don’t know that success doesn’t teach things as well — I won’t go that far to say that the wisdom rejection offers is more profound than that of success because both, I’ve learned, are pretty profound if you are paying attention.)

But nowadays, I see more of a pattern to rejection. And it’s staring us all in the face if we pay attention.

For example, read this article.

Look at what Warren Buffet has to say about rejection in the piece.

“The truth is, everything that has happened in my life…that I thought was a crushing event at the time, has turned out for the better,” Mr. Buffett says. With the exception of health problems, he says, setbacks teach “lessons that carry you along. You learn that a temporary defeat is not a permanent one. In the end, it can be an opportunity.”

Mr. Buffett regards his rejection at age 19 by Harvard Business School as a pivotal episode in his life. Looking back, he says Harvard wouldn’t have been a good fit. But at the time, he “had this feeling of dread” after being rejected in an admissions interview in Chicago.

And the other night, I was burned out so I turned on the tv. (Rare for me.) Lo and behold the biography channel was showing an episode on Rodney Dangerfield. Literally, what I learned about the man amazed me.

Rodney Dangerfield was once Jack Roy, a comedian who never made it. For 12 years Jack Roy toiled. Finally, he got married and quit showbiz all together. For the next 11 years after that he sold aluminum siding. (Middle class successful, too.) But he kept writing and writing and writing jokes. Finally, he couldn’t stand his life anymore and hit the stage again… with a new name. (Yep, Rodney Dangerfield.)

He ended up on Ed Sullivan.
He ended up being one of Johnny Carson’s favorite guests. (25 million viewers a night at the time.)
He opened a comedy club, did a few movies (Caddyshack and Back to School being all time classics, IMHO) and basically, Rodney Dangerfield became the man we know today. (Or used to know – he passed a few years ago.)

As it turned out, Rodney was a writer’s writer as well. The guy made it look so easy, “I tell ya, I don’t get no respect…” but Rodeny didn’t even hit upon that tag line til he was in his fifties.

Over 30 years after he started in show business!

And all the pros in the comedy business talked about how Rodney was so precise and meticulate with his lines. How he’d re-write and re-write and re-write jokes.

In the tv piece, Rodney talked about how it would talk him 3 or 4 months to write 6 minutes worth of material for Johnny Carson.

Four months to write 6 minutes? Wow.

Rodney knew rejection.
Warren Buffet knew rejection.
It taught them success.

And if we can teach our students this, we will have taught them something of great value.

Don’t give up. There is an Outstanding Plus Side to Rejection.

As I mentioned the other day, I am a big believer in goals. So much so that I always write them down.

Yet often, when I think of goals, I think in terms of career and professional aspirations. In a way it seems as if this is the way I am wired. (As is the rest of America. We are all about “productivity”. Buncha A-type personalities in the new land, that’s for sure.)

So today I am going to begin with “personal” goals, the non-professional elements that make for a life and not simply a career.

“Be a GREAT father, husband, friend, teacher and business associate.” That’s HUGE to me. And being a writer, I choose my words carefully. It’s not an accident that I use the word “great”. Why? Cause I want to be better than merely good. Now of course, I don’t always rise to the occasion (not hardly!) but I do find that having set my intention to aspire to this level helps me a great deal over the course of a year — especially as opposed to the way I used to live, simply meandering from experience to experience, never having a core set of inner principles to guide me. (BTW, can you hear the Covey influence on my life? That stuff works I tell ya!)

Also on my personal goal list is, “Take care of my physical health.” It’s why I am working to make a greater commitment to yoga. Truth be told, yoga has changed my life (and I am so the “level 1″ student that I am not sure if I’ll ever see level 2 — and yet still, yoga treats my body, mind and spirit exceptionally well. I am just a better human being when I do it with regularity.)

Then there’s “take care of my intellectual well-being.” For me this means I must make sure I carve out time to read and write.

Uhm, hello — don’t forget my emotional sanity. I need to make sure I laugh and participate in things that I find to be joyful while recognizing the potholes — the people and things — that make me feel tense, angry, frustrated, hopeless and so on… so that I can swerve away from them at every possible juncture. Look, I ain’t no effin saint and there’s a part of me that is more than willing to lay down with dogs so that I can mix it up and good — but I always wake up with fleas when I do so.

Goal setting helps me to remember this before I ever even encounter these people. (And you know who you are!)

And finally there’s the spiritual side of matters. The key this year for me — I mean it’s a really big goal — is to be more grateful. Gratitude often feels like the antidote for much of the stuff that gets to me and it makes me feel much more deeply connected to God.

That’s right, I said it. I believe (deeply) in God and gratitude really make me feel like I have a connection to this universal spirit more so than so many other things that purport to provide that for me.

No, it’s not the biggest list in the world. (Plus, I do have some specifics to which I will not speak in such a public forum.) Yet I feel that if I aspire to these goals and earn the grade of an A for effort in seeking to reach them this year, the actual results will all take care of themselves.

Focus on the process, know your larger personal aims and put in the hard work — these are my personal goals for 2010… and I think that it’s pretty clear to see that when I attain them (it’s always good to speak in the affirmative when goal setting; nothing wrong with assuming the accomplishment of any of these aims) the tackling of my “professional” goals will not only be much easier but more rewarding as well… because they will not come at the expense of what ought to be the most meaningful to me in my actual life.

Goals: The Personal Before the Professional

America’s definition of wealth is warped. And the definition of wealth we teach our kids is skewed as well. (After all, I should know. I think the way I have been taught to think about ideas such as “worth”, “value”, “assets” and so on are exceptionally demented being that the monetary association is always my first and foremost barometer for these definitions — when I know in my heart that family, health, service to others and so on are much more meaningful to me once I slow down and count up all my chickens.)

Let’s be honest, in the United States, people use money like a scorecard. We publish the salaries of movie stars, big-name athletes and CEO’s. The higher one ranks, the “better” a person is. And come on, isn’t salary — or lack thereof — one of the prime reasons so many people treat educators in a condescending manner? I tell ya this, a lot fewer people would hit me up with the ol’ ,”Oh you’re a teacher? I really admire the work you do. It must be so challenging yet rewarding,” pity-talk I often get at holiday parties if I was banking an 8 figure salary.

Instead, they’d be schmoozing me up for hot tips like, “Yo, let’s say I was at Bloom Taxonomy level 3 preparing for a unit quiz. Got any sweet “ins” on how I could get all the way to level six without sacrificing classroom management in the process of trying to hyper-engage all the different learning styles in my classroom?”

That’ll be the day, right?

Additionally, to the uber-rich, it often feels like — at least to an outsider looking in — that no matter how much money they have, it’s never enough.

What are they still seeking, I’ve often asked myself. I mean, how big of a steak can one person eat?

Interestingly, I came across this comment from Eli Broad, a man on the Forbes List of billionaires, about what the latest financial turmoil means to the people of our country. Broad says…

It’s not any longer simply about how much money you have, what your assets are worth. The happiest people I’ve found are in science. These people have three times the IQ — maybe I’m exaggerating. They have a higher IQ than I do. They love what they’re doing, they have a good family life, they’re satisfied. People are going to take a look at how we define wealth, and not just in financial terms. They’ll ask, what am I accomplishing? What am I going to leave behind? What am I doing with my kids? How am I going to help my community? I’ve not led a balanced life. If I had it to do over again, maybe I might lead a more balanced life.

Haven’t we all been indoctrinated to believe that by reading the Forbes List of billionaires we are also reading a list of those who are the most happy and satisfied in life? Haven’t we all been served a glass of kool-aid that gets us to believe that the more we possess, the more we are fulfilled?

Are we now at the dawn of re-evaluating wealth? Does 2010 ring in a year when fulfillment is part of the equation in determining one’s “assets”?

Will the ghost of my “level of income equates to my level of value in this world” ever stop haunting me?

Cause that’s the tainted Kool-Aid I done drunk.

As we enter Thanksgiving week it really is a time for me to recognize how much my students mean to me. I truly am a better human being because they are in my life.

They make me smile, laugh, hurt, angry, and tear up. They also make me proud, ashamed, hopeful and fearful.

And sometimes they do this back to back to back as if it’s all happening in the same day.

But without a doubt, the kids in my classroom make me remember what it’s like to be a kid… and no matter how old you are, you never want to forget that.

If being a teenager in this world is often a journey of better discovering your own inner identity then being a person that works with teens for a living is often a journey of getting to remember the things that are both so awesome and so terrifying about life.

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for the hundreds of teens with which I work every day. They may be bonkers — and they certainly drive me bonkers at different times — but top to bottom, I adore them.

Teaching teens is good stuff… and people with “real” jobs… well, they don’t know what they are missing.

Today would have been my father’s 67th birthday. He passed in 1994.

Never met my wife.
Never met my daughter.
Never saw me win Teacher of the Year for the state of California or publish a book… much less 9 of them (to date).

Died at the age of 51 from diabetes. (He was a juvenile diabetic.)

In many ways the life of my father was an absolute train wreck. And the shadow he cast over my life still colors vast amounts of psychological real estate in my own world today.

And yet, to oversimplify it all as if things are all black and white, as if he was a purely calamitous influence on me wouldn’t be right. (Though tumult, he did bring.)

But man, did my dad have a great laugh. And wow, was he smart. Wicked smart. Not quite smart enough to realize that being the smartest guy in the room could be a booby trap instead of a catapult but smart enough to graduate high school 2 years early and go to law school at UPenn.

It’s over 15 years since he passed and I still find myself thinking of him, being influenced by him, seeing the lives of my siblings being influenced by him so, so frequently.

Does the son ever stop being living underneath the umbrella of their father? And even if we could, would we want to? Though the pain was great, the love was great, too. I never doubted that my dad loved me but WOW, did he blow it over and over and over again.

You know, I know there are no guarantees in life but on days like today, I gotta admit, that if I only get 51 years on this planet, that would leave me with only about 8 more to go.

Geesh, if that thought won’t wake you up in the morning, nothing will. Sure brings some of this school nonsense I deal with on a daily basis into perspective though, huh?

Dads: they certainly cast a shadow, don’t they? Happy B-Day Pop.

(Note: that’s my dad’s headstone in the b.g. — it’s his mother’s headstone, my grandmother’s who just passed away this January in the foreground.)

New Year’s Eve is — and always has been — one of the most over-rated holidays on the calendar for me. Perpetual disappointment. (Actually, is it even an official holiday or is it just riding the coattails of Christmas in some way?) And while I am totally a night owl and will happily stay up chatting about most anything with folks until 3:00 a.m. if the topic/company warrants it — yep, been know to do it on school nights, too — getting obliterated, counting backwards from 10 to 1 and then pretending that I wished I were in Times Square watching the ball drop live, well… it’s just not my thing.

Times Square in January at midnight is cold and people are drunk. Mobs of people are drunk. Mobs of tourists are drunk. Call me old, but unless you’re a pick-pocket, being immersed in mobs of drunk tourists is, well… over-rated to say the least.

For me, my New Year always revolves around a school calendar anyway. That’s the true sundial of my life.

The approach of September is when new life feels as if it is about to bloom in me. There’s the back-to-school shopping I try to do in late August. (Often it goes like this: I know I should really get a new shirt or two but screw it, I don’t wanna go to the mall — so I am going back to Staples because, truth be told, school supply shopping brings me glee and in a hundred years it’s not gonna matter anyway).

There are the can’t really sleep the night before school jitters I still feel even though I’ve been at this so long my wife is bored with my, “I’m nervous about tomorrow, what if the kids don’t like me” neurosis.

I mean, face it… I could list a hundred little things that only a teacher would get. Essentially, I love the routine, the “plans”, the projects, the books, the conversations, and so on that swirl through my head this time of year. My life revolves around this calendar much more than it revolves around a January 1. I mean if I never saw another ball drop in Times Square (on TV or live — done both), I don’t think I’d really feel like I was missing anything in life. But if I didn’t have that, “it’s the first day of school next week, oh how I don’t want summer to end but oh how I’m excited to get back into the classroom again” inner conflict going in my life, I’d feel empty.

Lost.

I don’t even know if I could function without this sort of educational bio-rhythm. It brings order to my world. January 1 isn’t when the year starts — it’s when the year is about 42% over.

The year starts right about now and only the suckers who are forced to actually work “real jobs” don’t know it.