There’s a part of me that is just tremendously old fashioned.

I believe in the value of hard work.
I believe in the potential of kids.
I believe in saying please and thank you.

Therefore, when it comes to the end of the school year, I really feel as if the professional effort we give to them boils down to one simple question: don’t our students deserve it?

Don’t our kids deserve the right to be challenged these last few weeks of school?

I mean really, aren’t our kids being short-changed enough in these tough times? After all, none of this is really about us anyway; it’s about serving them. (At least, it’s supposed to be.)

Now sure, it’s exhausting. And most of us are exhausted. But as much as we need new tools, expanded resources, more money and heightened brain-power in education, these last few weeks really only require one thing to be successful.

A dedicated teacher who holds the intention of ending the school year with a BANG!

If you want to get something done, you will get it done. And if you don’t, you won’t. At this point, I am not sure how much “teacher effectiveness” can be legislated. Or student participation. This time of year is about looking into your own heart and deciding what type of teacher you want to be.

Sure, you can coast. At this point of the school year, shortcuts seem more obvious and tempting than ever. My advice is to reach down deep and GO FOR IT one more time.

Assign a passion project. Something meaningful. Something meaningful to you (because you feel strongly that kids need to learn “this”). Something meaningful to them (so that the students feel empowered with a sense of self-directed choice).

Indeed, we are on summer’s doorstep. My advice: don’t just survive the school year, finish it!

Finish strong.

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

Does it happen to everyone in education that they lose touch at some point, like an athlete that doesn’t know when to hang it up, and they hold on for too long… to the detriment of those they have been hired to serve?

Thing about this issue though is that age, oftentimes, has very little to do with the matter of when someone should hang up their educational spurs. Truly, some people ought to take their chips off the table after but 3 months in this profession — and for a few, that’s 90 days too long in this field! Others need to stick around for another 2 decades even if they have already put in 35 years of service. (Let me tell ya, Boca Raton, Florida retirement with dinner served at 4:30 p.m. can wait.)

For a boxer, as the years roll on you lose hand speed. And you get punched in the head too many times and it becomes clear to even the most casual fans when a once-ferocious fighter simply needs to stay out of the ring.

Football players, baseball players, NBA superstars… Father Time and Mother Nature conspire to do ‘em in. As ticket buyers we see it and we let ‘em know.

But in schools, it’s not really the same. Like I said, some of the best folks we have in education are people who have been in this field for 30 years or more.

(If only they could NEVER retire.)

However, as I also said, some of people should have hung up their educational spurs when Nixon was president.

All in all, the big point is that time and age don’t necessarily translate to “excellence” in our profession. As too many of us well know, some of the best folks we have in our field have been in their jobs for less than 5 years.

And they are the ones who are first to get chopped when the budget cuts roll in.

Ouch! We butcher our most promising seedlings.

Yet, some folks in our field (no names — or organizations — mentioned) quite wrongly equate “years in the classroom” to “quality of work being done in the classroom” — as false premise as ever there was.

Age before beauty… it’s not right! And when common sense returns to public education — or finally rears its head, as some may argue — the idea that quantity of time in a class trumps quality of time in a class will be expeditiously bounced.

My school district has already let us know that there are more cuts coming. Big ones. To personnel.

And it’s not just my school district that plans on breaking out the hatchet. More teachers are going to lose their jobs and I’ve even heard that some districts are talking about a 10-12% pay cut on top of drastic personnel cuts.

10-12%!?

At what point does the public refuse to accept this?
At what point do we refuse?

At my school, we took a 3% pay cut this year, furlough days, and lost a heck of a lot of teachers. Forget the lesser resources, no school nurse or librarian, an unfilled AP position, and more impacted classrooms.

BTW, lots of schools did likewise.

Question: Would you come back to work next year for 12% less pay, even less resources, and an even greater workload that is comprised of higher expectations with even less support? Are we powerless because they have the ability to hold our livelihoods over us or are we able to stand up and say no more?

Across the country, the web (this ning) allows us the opportunity to mobilize in a manner unlike any we have ever before seen.

Therefore, at what point do we refuse to accept the terms that are becoming more and more and more unacceptable?

Is a Tornado Sized National Teacher Strike Brewing? How Far can Teachers Be Pushed?

It could be done, ya know. And it would be historical.

Is push about to come to shove in 2010?

BTW, we could simply stop testing for 3 years and allow those billions to remain in the system to fund the actual “teaching” that the schools are supposed to do. Anyone notice how testing has not been cut while everything else has? Hmmm… I wonder who is making a financial killing off of that right now?

I think people have become numb to the issue of race in our schools. And to bring it up, I think people just roll their eyes and feel a bit exhausted by it all. It’s like we’ve all heard about the Achievement Gap and we are all familiar with Kozol and we are all aware of the fact that the black and brown kids are, in many ways, getting less — and performing in an lower capacity — than white and Asian kids.

Has our national conversation petered out? Has the conversation about teacher quality, tenure, budget cuts and national standards bludgeoned the race issue to the point of it being like a punch drunk boxer who still wants to fight, still feels they need to fight but yet, can’t really keep up with the current fight going on?

On one hand we can take credit for having come far. It’s admirable the progress we, as a nation, have made. But have we come far enough?

Have we lost the mojo behind this “cause”?

As America becomes more and more and more racially diverse, has the issue of race become a tired talking point? Or worse, are we simply coming to accept that inequality is simply going to be the order of the day?

I mean there are like almost no white kids at my school… and we are in deep NCLB probation territory.

Are their any all-white schools, I wonder, that have absolutely no minorities which are in deep NCLB probation territory?

I know… sssshhhh! Go talk about teacher quality, tenure, budget cuts and national standards. Social justice, we did that already. Moving on…

The world of television is changing. (No, prime time sitcoms are not being forced to shut down once and for all due to their pervasively mind-deteriorating fare. I mean these shows aren’t just intellectually insulting — I think they actually make you dumber if you watch them. More on that another time.)

Nope, TV is going digital. Or rather it’s gone digital. We are now in the era of all digital broadcasts and for those who did not get with the program, they are being left in the dust.

The FCC tried to warn them. The deadline to get up to the speed with the times was extended. But still, slackers being what they are — SLACKERS — there are guestimates that over 2.8 million American homes will simply get a blank, blue screen if they did not obtain a converter box when they turn on their tube. (BTW, the cost of this box is $40 but there is a government coupon to offset a large part of that fee.)

And why is this important? Because it shows that people often do not change until they are forced to change. Whether it’s a DNA style weakness in the human animal or simply a product of culture (i.e. the nature versus nurture argument) I think the bigger point is that we all recognize that when Arnold Schwarztenegger says he is going to end the age of textbooks, we need to expect that there is going to be whining and moaning and people incredibly reluctant to get with the program.

And they will drag their feet.

And there will be problems in the conversion, too. (I believe the word being tossed around these days is “discomforting” when it comes to adapting to new technologies in our lives.)

But does that mean we should not move on from a very stagnant educational tool which has clearly stopped serving the needs of the students in the way we now need these needs served? (By that I mean textbooks.)

Of course not!

2.8 million homes are gonna go “What the F%$(@?” when they try to turn on their TV this week. And inevitably, there is going to be a huge surge in demand for these conversion boxes because people are going to realize the necessity of getting with the program.

And I expect the same thing for quite some time in education as well. A heck of a lot of folks will be squawking and refusing to want to buy into the idea that technology (while still problematic in so many ways, I agree) is here to stay.

But at some point, we will convert and the tools being considered to replace the 5 pound textbook strike me as exciting, innovative, intelligent and excellent.

BTW, the best ideas inside the textbooks are not being kicked to the curb — simply the tool which delivers these ideas. And once people recognize that Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen and so on are NOT being thrown under the bus — only the beastly, cumbersome, excessively expensive textbooks are — then I think folks will realize that we are most assuredly moving in a positive, progressive direction.

Will there be problems? Yep. But are there problems now? Immensely so.

Therefore, the stagnant pot of school is about to be stirred by the spoon of innovation.

Like the old children’s game of hide-n-seek, the Governator just cried out, “Ready or not, here I come!”

And textbook publishers have got to be shivering. Disruptive innovation is about to disrupt their profit stream in a crazy way. Just ask the newspaper industry.