Here’s an article on the 20 Best Prep Schools in America, as decided by Forbes (I assume. It’s their article.)

Here’s what they say about #1…

The top prep school in the U.S. is the Trinity School, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City. Founded in 1709, this co-ed day school has an average enrollment of 960 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. There’s one teacher for every six students, more than 80% of the faculty hold an advanced degree and the school’s $40 million endowment helps assure the facilities are first-rate. Tuition for one year of schooling in the Upper School (grades 9-12) is $34,535, though the school offers financial aid.

And here are all the things my school has in common with #1.

• We were both founded (at some point, though they have a few hundred years on us, I think).
• We’re both co-ed.
• We’re both in the U.S.

And in what ways is your school similar to the Trinity School, I ask?

Should I feel bad that my school is not more like The Trinity School, I wonder?

Are articles like this designed to make me feel inferior about the school where I teach/the schools where I will send my own children or is that just my insecurity showing?

No, I don’t think all America should be held to this standard, but I do want to know, if you are teaching at a 6 to 1 ratio where tuition is $34K a year, which inconveniences you more: classroom management issues or your pedicurist canceling without providing you sufficient notice.

No, no, I jest. I am sure the teachers who work at Trinity are plagued with all kinds of issues that stem from holding the job of being an educator in modern America. See, that’s the one thing: kids are kids are kids.

And parents are parents are parents.

Some of the kids will make you click your heels in joy. Some of the kids will make you cry out in frustration. Some of the parents will make realize that being a teacher feels like one of the most noble and fulfilling jobs on the planet. And some of the parents will make you feel like dog-doo.

Yes, the Trinity School and Lynwood High might be millions of years apart in some ways, but in others, I am sure there is more common ground than mot people would, at first glance suspect.

Why I wrote The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez

After Homeboyz came out my career ascended to a whole new height. The popularity of the title mixed with the accolades mixed with the attention and awards moved me up “to the next level”. And then one day a group of girls, Latina students of mine, came up to me and asked…

“How come you don’t write a book about us?”

The Hoopster, Hip-Hop High School and Homeboyz all had African-American characters as their protagonist. Why? Because I aspired to get my students to read through writing books for them, books where they saw their own lives directly reflected on the page. But at Lynwood High, a growing portion of the student body was Hispanic – and my girls felt a little cheated.

When these Latina students hit me with this question, I immediately felt bad. As a teacher, you never want to play favorites between your kids and this was a group of really awesome girls, students I tremendously enjoyed having in class. Additionally, racial tension between brown and black kids on campus has been an issue for years and years (The race riot scenes in my book Hip-Hop High School and The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez are fictionalized accounts of race riots we have had on campus) so being fair and balanced in aspiring to write a book for all of my students, so that the Hispanics had the same feeling of “my English teacher wrote a book for us, too” instantly became a high priority for me.

And then I asked the question, the one which turned out to be the fuse that lit the dynamite.

“Well,” I said to this group of Hispanic teenager girls. “What should I write about?”

If you know anything about teens, you know that asking a teenage Latina to talk can be a dangerous thing because, once asked, they are going to talk and talk and talk and talk.

Lunchtime in my room. After school. They talked and talked and talked and I just listened and listened and listened. That’s when I saw a few incredibly common threads between so many of my Latina girls. (Note: These are simply my observations from our conversations – please don’t get all politically correct on me for being honest or go cuckoo with emails to me about matters of race, gender equality and so on. These are broad strokes here – case by case, of course it can be different)

1. Boys were treated better than girls in their home/culture. (i.e. Machismo is still alive and kicking.)
2. Girls were outperforming boys in school, really stepping into their own and coming on stronger than they ever had while the boys were lame.
3. Girls were caught in the crosshairs between serving the family and getting an education as if the two were mutually exclusive… and mothers from the prior generation who had made the choice to value familia first and foremost were often applying the most pressure to follow in their footsteps and be homemakers as opposed to independent, well-educated women with professional careers.
4. First generation immigrants (illegals and legal – I teach both at my school) often were the bridge to the English speaking world for their non-English speaking parents, of which there are millions in America. The daughters, even ones as young as 8 or 9 years old, were the official translators for parents who had never learned English – even if they had been in America for more than 10 years. They may have immigrated, but they did not assimilate.
5. Sexual molestation was a HUGE problem… and it was incredibly under-reported to authorities, other family members and so on. Teen Latina girls were being sexually abused at a far greater rate than I had ever imagined. It was, tragic to say, “common”.
6. Today’s young girls are smart as a whip, ferociously determined and a whole lotta fun to be around. They really do LOVE to laugh.

These notes – and others – are what inspired The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez, a book that has been exceptionally well-embraced by Hispanic readers, boys and girls alike. My own opinion as to why boys like this book so much is because of the cultural validation. In this novel I worked exceptionally hard to move beyond stereotypes and illuminate the beauty of the Hispanic culture. Latinas are a remarkable people, unique and distinguished, and the pride so many teens feel in seeing their culture portrayed in a positive light – despite it being “and warts and all” book – has really won over scores of young adults.

Last thing about The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez that I should mention is that I never in a million years would have been able to write this book without genuinely listening to my students. When you read the book, I take the reader deep into Mexico, a Mexico that a white guy like me could never really know firsthand. It truly took a latino to shine a light on this private, inside the culture world and I can’t tell you how many comments I have had from Hispanic readers who say, “how did you know this.”

It’s because real people illuminated it for me. From the code-switching language (my students proofed the Spanish that is peppered throughout the text) to the quirky little aspects of life as an American Latina who is caught between the two worlds, two cultures and two completely different sets of expectations (based on gender), without the real voice of my students, The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez would not have any real voice at all.

Why I wrote Homeboyz…

As many know, I am an inner-city high school teacher in Los Angeles at Lynwood High. It goes without saying that I love my kids and love being an English teacher but Los Angeles is a city plagued by teen violence and many, many, many of my students live in a community that is poisoned by gangs, guns and drugs.

Students at our school have been shot. Murdered. Killed. And tragically, violent teenage death has become so common in urban America (especially when it comes to minorities killing other minorities; there are virtually no white students at my school) that when this sort of monstrosity happens, it doesn’t even make the newspapers.

Owch!

Worse, it feels as if there is an entire segment of the media that profits off of selling young kids the idea that gangs are cool, sexy, fun and adventurous. They’re not. Gangs are violent, anti-social and deeply hurtful to many, many people – and no one gets hurt more so than the young kids who get caught up in these street gangs. Therefore, when I see major record companies and multi-media conglomerates “selling the gangsta lifestyle” to our nation’s kids in order to make a buck, I get angry and frustrated.

The fact is, becoming embroiled in gangs – real gangs, not wanna-be stuff but real gangs – ends up one of pretty much two ways for young people. Kids go to jail or kids go to the cemetery. Of course, in music videos and the such, it all looks like a pumpin’ party. But go visit Juvenile Hall or prison – I have, many times – and you will see that the reality is an entirely different story.

It was this idea that was the spark which inspired me to write Homeboyz. I wanted to do a book that stripped away the false romance, that peeled away the pretend glamour, that didn’t buy into the bullshit that gangs were a just a life of non-stop partying.

Homeboyz is raw. Homeboyz is gritty. Homeboyz is a tragedy.

And Homeboyz has also been my most popular book. It’s won awards, it’s turned on thousands of readers, it’s got people talking about turning it into a feature length movie.

But probably, the thing that is most rewarding to me is that Homeboyz has been “that” book, the one that teachers everywhere have given to kids who swear they don’t like to read.

I’ve got boatloads of emails from people all across the country telling me the same story over and over.

I’ve got this boy (it’s inevitably a boy) and he wouldn’t read a thing. But he read Homeboyz and loved it! It’s the first book he has ever read cover to cover.

That to me, is just flat out awesome! Homeboyz has achieved cult-like status in certain circles, a fact which makes me really proud.

I love sports. Always have, always will.

And if you love sports the way I do you really get into all aspects of the game. This even extends to coaches and how they speak with the media.

I have a feeling I should start to take a hint. (More on that in a sec.)

In today’s world, it’s a simple truism of life. If you can’t “manage” the media (no one really “controls” it, but most coaches and players — the more high profile, the more important this is — do work hard to “manage” the media) you are cooked.

I guess this is why coaches so often devolve into politically correct blandness. When hit with adversity like a bad call by the officials, you know they swear like sailors behind the scenes but in front of the cameras, they all know that you will not last long if you don’t work to say the right things about the refs, your opposition, the higher-ups that own the teams, run the athletic departments at the universities and so on.

It’s like that scene from the movie Bull Durham where Kevin Costner teaches Tim Robbins how to speak in cliches. Funny, but true.

As a blogger, I seek the opposite. I am trying to be honest, unvarnished and forthright. But now that the stakes are so clearly set for me and my school about “raise your test scores or suffer the consequences” I feel as if I am at risk of being too blunt.

I want to provide a window. A look in. A means for folks to see what it’s like from a real classroom perspective in a manner that actually has some flavor, some spice, some opinion and works not to pull punches so that the reality of these circumstances can be exposed — and maybe we can all learn how to be better at what we do as a result. (I really view myself as a learner, first and foremost, and writing empowers me to be incredibly reflective about my profession.)

Yet, there’s a part of me that fears the approach I take to blogging could cause me trouble. For example, if I say that teaching undocumented kids in a Title 1 school who have parents that don’t speak English sets our teachers up to have lower test scores than people who teach in schools where the predominance of kids have college-educated parents who don’t live a community plagued by things like violence, transience, little formal education, and so on, I open myself up to criticism of…

– being racist
– having low expectations for my kids
– not believing in the power of young people
– being classist
– doubting the ability to turnaround our district
and on and on and on.

Never mind that I have taught at Lynwood High and worked with such kids for years and years and loved the job, the parents I’ve met, and the work immensely. But now that the NCLB screws are turning on our staff and all our jobs are apparently at risk — while teachers who work in schools with virtually no issues of like ilk to ours are not having their jobs held over their head if they don’t immediately raise their bubble test scores — am I being too blunt?

The playing field has not been equal for kids who live in America’s lower socio-economic communities since public education began.

And now a part of me feels as if the teachers of those kids are being demonized for it. Is the playing field of teacher accountability truly equal?

I genuinely do believe in accountability.

I think this message of mine gets lost when I rip on the bubble tests as being the end-all, be-all of assessment in public education.

Yes, I do want elevated academic performance.
Yes, I do want high student achievement.
Yep, I am a big fan of improved classroom work.

However, I think the measures we use to gage accountability in education are flawed… and when flawed measures are used to evaluate my job performance, it makes me want to cry foul.

Of course, it’s inarguable that accountability is not good for the kids. (Poor of a sentence as that may be.) We really do need to know that teachers are doing their jobs. And unfortunately/tragically we all know that there is a segment of our teaching population that takes incredible advantage of “the system”. They are not doing their jobs and it hurts us all.

I loathe those teachers. Truly.

So how do my bosses know if I am teaching my kids if my kids can’t “achieve” on their assessments?
Take my word for it?
Trust me?

They aren’t buying that. And really, I am not so sure that they should… at least not hook, line and sinker.

Yet from my perspective as a teacher, if you are using a flawed means of assessment (i.e. narrowly constricted bubble tests) to evaluate me, you are not really being fair to me.

A classic Catch 22 thus confronts us. Use knowingly deficient accountability measures to enforce higher educational standards which result in collateral damage being done to the classrooms of teachers who are very much doing a solid job in their careers (as I feel is being done to me by literally mandating I “raise my scores or lose my job”) or allow the lemons to hide behind false fronts and continue to dodge professional bullets.

The screws of accountability are being turned right now and it hurts. As I said, I have no problem with people measuring my performance, assessing my professionalism, or holding me to a high — or higher — standard. Actually, I’d be honored if you did. Come on down to room 6213 at Lynwood High any time.

Yet, by having reduced the essence of the work I do to solely that of standardized test scores, I just don’t feel it paints an accurate picture.

All in all, I am now a teacher focused on test prep. This is what the “accountability monster” has created… irrationalism. You can’t push one thing without pulling something else.

As I have been talking about all week, we are faced with the very real threat of having our school district taken over by the state with lots of people terminated in the process. Test scores are the first box on the check sheet they will look at. You either have good ones or you don’t.

And so I must raise them or “go gently into that goodnight”. (BTW, that’s an allusion to a philosophical reference which will not be tested on the bubbles so whether or not my students ever grasp this “ideal of living” is, I guess, superfluous. English Language Arts is about properly identifying the gerund phrase in a sentence these days… or nothing at all.)

What kind of teacher does one have to be to show up at a professional development meeting on a Saturday morning.

When it’s raining and cold.

And it’s one week before school lets out for the Winter Holidays?

And there is no “mandate” to attend nor is there extra pay. Just simple, free high quality PD. (Well, I certainly work my tail off to make it so.)

See, that’s the question I asked myself last Saturday. After working at Lynwood High all day — and just having a BOMBING DAY with the kids in class, wall-to-wall work and madness, I went straight to the airport from school, caught a flight – which was delayed due to bad weather – ate dinner by myself at an LAX airport (Spago’s it was not) and arrived at a Holiday Inn around 10:45 pm on Friday night looking to check in and shower. Then I was up again preparing to speak by 5:45 am.

But I was being paid and I could always have said no so there’s no complaining from me. I knew the terms before I ever accepted the invitation.

However, as I looked out at the teachers, literacy coaches and admins in the audience, I had to ask myself, “What kind of educator does one have to be to show up at a professional development meeting on a Saturday morning, when it’s raining and cold and it’s one week before school let’s out for the Winter Holidays and there is no “mandate” to attend… nor is there extra pay.

And just now the answer appeared for me.

The kind of teacher I want teaching my own kid.

So I have been getting lots of notes and the such as of late asking me to let a few people backstage, behind the scenes, into the kitchen to see how books get written, vetted, sold, and published.

Yes, I am a regular ol’ high school English teacher working at Lynwood High in Los Angeles but I also moonlight as an author having published books with Disney, Scholastic, Recorded Books and, coming soon (I just inked a new contract for a new YA title), Penguin, as well.

I write books for teens. Or for people that work with teens. Right now, that’s “my thing”.

The truth is, there are a great many similarities between student writing and professional writing. And there are scores and scores and scores of pages I can write about the process of becoming published. So going forward, I am going to start flavoring this blog with insights from the “other side” of literacy (i.e. the book writing side as opposed to the book reading side) and then work to make connections back to the kids, the classroom and so forth.

In a way, the writing/publishing process seems as if it’s kind of secretive to others. People ask me all the time, “How do you get a book published?”

Really, it’s not all that cryptic. Write a good book. Do that first and foremost.

Wait, let me re-phrase that, because we all know that there are lots and lots of books out there that are hunks-a-junk.

So what’s the rule?

Write a good book. Yes indeed.

See, I don’t really need to re-phrase the advice at all. Everyone is going to have an opinion on what is “good” and not everyone is going to like your stuff no matter who you are. (Just ask Stephanie Meyers who has some folks swearing she’s the cat’s meow and other folks complaining that if they read about one more “crooked smile” on the face of some sexed-up teen vampire hunk they are going to heave her Twilight tome into a furnace!)

You, as the writer, must believe in your own work. If you are not ready to stand up for your own effort, to declare that “Yes, this is worth reading!” then why-oh-why do you expect anyone else to waste their precious time investing what you yourself do not believe is really worth a hoot. Reading takes time, effort and mental energy and there are lots and lots of options out there for us all to digest.

So if you want to become published, write something you believe is worth reading. Write a good book! Human beings are hungry, starving for things that “speak” to them… and I have yet to meet anyone who has said, “Ya know, that’s enough for me. I’ve had my fill of hearing good stories, meeting great characters, vicariously experiencing new predicaments, settings, circumstances, triumphs and so forth.”

Look, for me there comes a point for me where I hate every book I am working on and think it’s the worst piece of crap that has ever been stroked on a keyboard. (Homeboyz one of my most successful and highly acclaimed books to date was, in my opinion, an absolute train wreck at times and I literally wanted to pull out the hair of my main character — as well as my own — because he was torturing me like you don’t even know. And yet, with time in the chair, my butt in the seat and a steely determination to “crack this nut” I finally broke through — stuff that no one really knows about this experience of writing what has become a real student favorite, particularly with reluctant reading kids.) Then again, if you are a writer, you have to know that by nature you are a dramatist and therefore, you can’t fall prey to the daily roller-coaster whims of “this is going to be the best piece of literature ever!” on Tuesday to ” I knew I should have become a CPA… why-oh-why did you ever think you become an author?” on Wednesday.

Neither extreme is true.

You put your butt in a chair and work day in and day out and give it your best — and then, after you string a few hundreds days in a row like that together, you have something. What do you have? Well, that’s up to you. But before you can be a writer you must do the work of a writer. You must learn your craft and the only way to do so is by applying your craft.

Writers write.

Like I tell my students, there is no magic pill I can give them to improve their reading ability or improve their writing ability. There are no literary steroids. What there is is true effort. Intellectual sweat. Mistake making, hard work and time — lots of it.

Really, I am not sure anyone becomes “good” without having travelled along the road of having been “poor”. Is there such a thing as talent? Sure, but talent will rarely reveal itself nor fulfill its own potential until work ethic plows its path.

You may not like Stephanie Meyers, you may love her, but one thing no one can dispute is that she sits her rear-end in a chair and cranks out 600 plus page books. That takes effort, discipline and endurance.

And those are the elements which real writers cultivate.

Writers write.

As for me, currently I am proofing a new book. The title is still under lock-n-key as I haven’t yet sold this book — my agent just finished it, really, really, liked it, and we are going to “go out with it” and try to sell it in the next few weeks. (I’ll keep ya posted.) But I will tell you this, it’s a comedy, it’s for YA readers and my wife thinks I am cuckoo because she hears me late at night typing away at my computer laughing out loud in a room where I am sitting all by myself. (In my own defense though, if I am not laughing, who will? — even if it does mean I might need to be fitted for a straight-jacket at some point going forward. I mean some things, like being published, are worth the price of admission, right?)

Now, I’ll circle back to the genesis of ideas (my students supply me with SO much material — all I do is work to be a listener and entire universes unfold), the process of actually writing (often late at night when others are sleeping — but you have to find the time no matter what), character, plot, motivation, antagonists and protagonists, setting and more — at a later date. Right now, if there’s a take-away today it’s this.

Writers write. It’s the only way to advance.

I’ll never forget the time I heard Neil Simon say,” The page is just as blank for me when I wake up in the morning as it is for you.” That stuck with me.

Writers write. He knows it. I know it. Now you know it.

Writers write.

I love sports. I love hoops, football, baseball, boxing, soccer, hockey, tennis and so on. And when I mean “and so on”, I mean, I can watch table tennis, badminton, lacrosse, rugby and golf.

Yep, I can watch golf.

But I only like to watch when there is level competition. If a game is a blowout, it’s off. If a team has a 35 point lead heading into the 4rth quarter, a 3 goal lead late into the second half, an 11 run lead in the bottom of the seventh, I am usually gone. Got other things to do and if I miss the comeback of the century I’ll catch the highlights on ESPN.

See, for me, there is no pleasure in watching sports when there is no element of a fair, heated competition between the players. If there is extreme competition though, the kind that calls on all opponents to reach deep down to give their best, I am all with it.

So, here’s an idea… what if we handicap our much discussed upcoming teacher/student/school evaluations like we do the game of golf? I mean we all realize that some schools have such a built in advantage before we ever tee up the school year that if we simply go head up (as we currently are), our score vs score comparison is going to make the competition a blowout.

So unexpected, too, right?

Almost without fail the upper-socioeconomic educational institutions in the U.S. are kicking butt and taking names. And despite the occasional “feel-good” anomaly (the kind which I strive to create in my own classroom), the low socio-economic schools are getting trounced.

But if we take into account mitigating factors such as English Language Learners, students living at or below the poverty level, degree of transience in the student body, special ed populations, and so on, suddenly there might be a way to really get a true glimpse into which teachers/schools/kids are really making strides.

Of course, from this point on, it’s all conjecture and academic with little need for me to draw up the “how we can do this” because, though I am no cynic, I see almost no way in the world whereby the parents who send their kids to schools like Beverly Hills High are ever going to allow a system of data to be implemented whereby the kids at inner-city schools like mine at Lynwood High will be able to actually outperform them.

Not when they pay those kind of property taxes, live in those kind of houses and support political candidates with those kind of fundraisers.

Nope, not a cynic… but not a naif either. Those parents would have heads a rollin’ if they saw their weighted test scores in the newspaper showing them to be getting whooped like a Greek mule on Crete during high tourist season.

Yet, to handicap the competition would level it out? Or would it?

See, now I don’t know. On one hand I think yep, applying a true growth model whereby we use baseline measures and then end-of-year evaluations to the data in order to show true achievement over the course of the year makes a lot of sense. But if we take mitigating factors like poor academic history, non-English speaking homes, lack of internet access, ability to hire private tutors to remediate under-performance, and so on into account (there’s gotta be a mathematic formula for this, right?) then, on one hand we are creating a level playing field whereby my kids can go up against any kids in the country. (And we’d LOVE to do that!) Yet, by handicapping our schools accordingly are we sending a mixed message?

Or even a wrong one?

Are we saying that “since you come from less, we expect less”?(And are therefore “lesser”?) See that troubles me deeply.

In my own class in Los Angeles, I tell my kids “no excuses” and we work to beat the metaphorical Beverly Hills High kids from day 1… cause I know that’s how the real world works.

But when I see my school get the “data” back from the state, I realize that to not take into account mitigating circumstances such as all the urban challenges we face, I realize, we’ve been set up for slaughter like a junior league baseball team taking on the New York Yankees.

Sure, the Yankees may give up a game now and then, but over the course of a season, the Yankees are gonna absolutely steamroll the junior leaguers time and time again.

And if I am the Yankees, I am not sure where the fun is in that. Yankees want to play the Red Sox. Ali wants to fight Frazier. The USC Trojans wants to kick Notre Dame’s butt… not Akron Community College’s butt.

At the end of the day, golf is ultimately a game you play against yourself and the course. You can only control what you can control — your own effort, preparation, practice time and so on. But if it rains, there’s wind, someone plays at 8 am when there’s no wind and another person tees off at 3:p.m. when a tsunami-like gusts are howling… what can you do?

You play the round that is on front of you. Some schools have kids where 98% of the parents went to college. And some have an 18% parent attended college ration… complicated by high truancy numbers and less resources cause there’s no real PTA out there raising a few hundred grand a year to make sure that the arts haven’t been killed off for their kids.

Yet the thing for all players to remember is, you gotta remember to love the game. Otherwise, you’ll never be the best you can.

I’ve read scores and scores of books on the art and science of teaching. Many of the big names, lots of small ones, folks who have had some genuinely brilliant stuff to say and others who struck me as flat out nincompoops. But I think that one of the most important things I have taken away from all my “studies” is something about which everyone in our profession needs to be frequently reminded.

We flub. We mess up. We make mistakes… on almost a daily basis.

Sure, there are days when their is magic at the whiteboard, as if our dry erase markers were an alchemist’s wand turning neurological water into cranial fine wine. But most days, balls are dropped. Opportunities come up but they are not seized. Something exceptional is planned and it falls flat on its face. I come off as salty when in fact I am in a great mood but merely pressed for time. Yes, I always want to be attuned to the individual needs of all my kids –especially the ones that merely need a friendly, encouraging voice that day — but when I am in the midst of navigating 186 other kids over the course of 7 hours and the fire alarm has just been pulled for the fourth time in a row during third period by a buncha comedians in the halls, I sometimes miss the cues.

I aim to do great and then I find myself just barely hanging on. The last bell of the day rings and I realize that I did not get done nearly the amount of things I needed to do in order for tomorrow to function the way it ought to. Friday hits and I realize that I really need to work both Saturday and Sunday in order to make sure Monday is gonna work the way it needs to — and in the ways my kids deserve it to.

But I’ve got plans with the family, errands long left undone, a stack of paperwork from my own life to navigate (like the very pedestrian necessity of paying bills) and my pillow is taunting me with the idea of actually getting more than 5 1/2 hours of sleep every night.

And do I manage it all in some sort of suave, filled-with-European panache fashion? Hell no. I stumble forward, bang my foot into the dresser and screw up.

I bumble and stumble forward. And this is after 10 years at Lynwood High and even longer than that in the profession.

Yet, the difference now is that I understand this about teaching. I get that this is the nature of our career beast. Early in my career I used to get down on myself, really beat the crap out of myself. Think to myself, “Ya know, you really stink at this — and you are working at almost maximum life capacity to be this bad. It’s hard, I am no good, and the kids deserve better. Shouldn’t you pack up and go find a cubicle somewhere that offers bathroom breaks any time you need to pee?”

However, with experience, that negative-loop tape recording no longer plays in my head. Why? Because I’ve come to realize no one ever masters the art of teaching. No one is immune to falling short, fouling up, getting caught in a situation for which you were completely unprepared and acting in ways that, “Oh, if I could only turn back the clock 45 minutes and get a do-over, the world would be so much better.”

It just doesn’t happen.

And so here I am, so frequently with my tail between my legs. But if I set my intention to do as well as I can do, continue to try and improve my craft, make sure that I learn from my mistakes and remain optimistic about the future, I think I am gonna be alright.

And if I can remain alright, I do believe I have something of great value to offer my kids. Even if sometimes I am going to trip and fall and bang my head on a desk in front of a room full of teenagers who are gonna make no bones about laughing at me and telling all their friends at lunch what a dork Mr. Alan is.

Cause at the end of the day, this is a job that can only be highlighted in a “And warts and all” type of fashion. There is just no way to ever avoid the, as Homer Simpson would say, “D’Oh!” of being a teacher.

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?