Ellen Hopkins has written some ferocious books. Brave, gritty, hard-hitting and read by lots and lots and LOTS of teens. I am a big fan of her work.

Interestingly, a brouhaha has recently surfaced about Ellen’s “dis-invitation” to speak at a Teen Lit Fest in Texas.

I use quotes around the words “dis-invitation” because I really have no idea what actually went down. Where it stands now is that Ellen wrote a blog post called CENSORSHIP BITES that has raged through cyber-space… and now the Teen Lit Fest is being accused of all sorts of things and a bunch of celebrated YA authors have backed out of appearing (after previously accepting an invite) to take a stance against censorship.

The mainstream news has even caught up with the story and now things are really starting to hit the fan. And the people in Texas are looking as if they have big egg on their face. (FYI, Ellen has written some edgy books and is no stranger to having her work censored, I am sure, due to the graphic nature of the content.)

However, some event organizers claim that Ellen was never officially invited – a non-formal inquiry was supposedly floated to her, but not an official invitation – and people are jumping the gun by saying she was dis-invited when in fact, she was never even invited in the first place. (Ellen addresses this quite passionately in her blog post linked above. She clearly states she was indeed invited and then dis-invited.)

So perhaps this is a case of miscommunication combining with the forces of the world wide web to create a kerfuffle where there never really was one? Or perhaps it’s not and people are trying to censor Ellen Hopkins. I don’t know.

But no matter what happened, a big boo-boo was made somewhere and a Teen Reading Festival could be forced to go try and be festive without any authors to add some festivity.

Texas at the center of another storm. Sheesh, they keep this up and New York is gonna be getting jealous pretty soon.

Legendary coach John Wooden passed away last night and the truth is, I have been struggling with multiple attempts at today’s blog post in an effort to put some of my thoughts about the man into perspective.

Alas, I am just discombobulated about it. Sure, he was a basketball coach who reached unprecedented heights, but it was his Pyramid of Success which really helped to inform my own philosophy and outlook on life.

And so, for today, I will leave it at that. With an eye towards doing a blog series about the Pyramid. Truly, he was a man which brought a lot of good light into this world.

If you haven’t followed the prior few days of my blogs on the notion of evaluating teacher effectiveness you might want to go back and do some prep before you read this next post… cause today, I am going to go to bat for yet another key ingredient requisite to drafting a fair, multi-textual portrait of my professionalism as an educator.

I want the kids to weigh in. Yep, let the customers have their say!

The criticism I most often hear with this idea is that the kids can’t be trusted. I believe the opposite is true. I think the kids often give me the most honest insight into what happens in the rooms of other teachers.

When I want to know how a math or history or science teacher is, I go to my students. And you know what… they tell the truth.

The rigorous teachers don’t get slammed. They may get complained about for being too demanding but they don’t get torched. Kids want to learn and teachers that reach and teach them get love when the teacher is out of earshot.

However, the teachers that don’t teach do get scorched. Of course, face to face, the kids act as if the teacher who lets students “kick it” and not work hard and watch movies and the such, they think they are friends with the students… and that the students have their backs.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The kids do not respect these type of teachers and they get sold out as being “dudes who do nothing, who never do nothing in class” whenever someone asks.

The kids might very well be the MOST honest group of people on campus.

A teacher that works ‘em may not be adored, but they will be respected and when evaluation time comes around, the students will most certainly say as much.

“She demands too much and gives too much work and is always making me do stuff.” To the knowing eye, is this really a bad eval? Even if they say, “And she’s mean, too.”

I think we can all read between the lines on that one. One day, I hope my daughter says this. It’s beats the opposite. “Oh, she’s too easy. I’m bored.”

But kids will tell you the real deal. “All we do in that class is copy the problems from the textbook and the teacher doesn’t do hardly nothing,” or “All that teacher does is check their FaceBook page all day long” and on and on.

What should we not trust about this? Are we worried that kids will conspire to collectively lie to try and railroad a teacher? Well, in the anonymous system I propose (see earlier post from a few days ago) I believe kids will tell the truth. (Frankly, I’d be more worried about department wide conspiracies to oust someone by the teachers than I’d be worried about all students buying into a prank to screw over a good educator — and I already addressed that concern as not too legit a concern at all. The Atticus! argument).

Plus, all evals would be viewed over time. 3 years minimum.

Year 1 filled with THIS TEACHER STINKS! evals, well, hey, that could be an anomaly. Year 2 filled with THIS TEACHER STINKS! evals, well, this could be the start of a pattern. But three years in a row of THIS TEACHER STINKS! evals?

And then we look at the peer evals.
And then we look at the admin evals.
And then we look at the, hold your breath, students achievement levels via test scores.

And if all of them point to a “Whoa, this person is a bottom dwelling lemon in every category we consider,” well, that’s when the consequences of not measuring up on the teacher effectiveness scale do seem to have a bit of credibility, don’t they?

Let the kids speak. They will take the evals seriously (for the most part) and they should have a say if for no other reason than it’ll be quite honest.

Multiples measures for measuring teacher effectiveness will continue tomorrow… post is growing too long.

I want to keep this short and sweet today but I feel as if I owe an apology to the folks in Alabama who found my blog post from two weeks ago to be hurtful, inappropriate and incendiary.

That was never my intention. And you should know that I took down the post.

Though I thought I went out of my way to salute the educators making strides in the Deep South — the ones really laying it on the line in an admirable way who are working their tails off, bringing change and fighting for social equity in the Alabama schools — apparently, that point was lost and some Alabamians felt unfairly targeted. Re-segration through gerry-mandering was the broad picture theme of the post but I have a tendency to be flippant, smarmy and insensitive at times in my quest to be entertaining as well as informative — and I seem to have genuinely hurt some people’s feelings.

I am not Glenn Beck. I am not an anger-monger. I actually find this kind of rage to be detrimental to productive growth and in the spirit of seeking to open an earnest dialogue, I instead opened something else to which people took a great deal of offense.

I have no ambition at all to hurt people, destroy the morale of educators and the such. And with so many teachers already feeling demoralized (see this article — a whopping 40%!) I certainly have no aspiration to add more salt to our collective educational wounds.

BTW, choosing to take down the post was a real Catch-22 for me because I am not one prone to bow to pressure or censorship. However, in the end I believe I erred. I made a mistake. Why? Because I was insensitive and even came across as haughty (cause it ain’t like the state of California doesn’t have issues with race, poverty, small-mindedness and so on… which I do feel I often point out in my blogs but hey, that’s a different story.) Yet at the end of the day, my greatest mistake was that I added a bunch of negativity to a bunch of hard-working educator’s lives and that’s not who I want to be nor what I want to do… so I have taken a step back and decided to simply say, “I am sorry and I will try to do better in the future.”

Obviously, some people are gonna be furious with me forevermore for insulting Alabama. I can’t change that. However, I do know that if there is a productive, positive conversation to be had about gerry-mandering school district zones and institutionalized racism, by no means will I be shying away from this topic in the future, Alabama or not. But I will work harder to make sure I don’t paint such wide brush strokes in the name of going for a giggle.

I messed up. Oops! Time to move on.