On Monday we had a department-wide staff meeting in my room and I felt the need to apologize to everyone. Why? Because the week prior I was feeling salty and frustrated and aggravated at having been asked by our administration to lead our ELA department out of the bowels of NCLB hell (I’m not even the Department Chair) and during the course of doing some internal, department wide PD I was doing, I was kinda blunt.

I was brusque.

Indeed, I was chippy.

And usually, that’s not me. But damn, my buttons were pushed.

I should know better though. I mean face it, in a way, teachers can be the absolute WORST audience for other teachers to teach. Every rule they have in their own room is a room is a rule they feel they can break when someone else is at the front board. They talk when they feel like it, take phone calls when they feel like it, and already know the answers to all the questions even before the questions are asked.

Forget about the tardiness factor. Sheesh… just show up whenever the heck you want, why don’t you?

And when you dare to suggest that they might in some, slight way be acting hypocritical for this behavior — even if you are right, you are wrong. Ya can’t win for losing.

Like I said… Sheesh!

This is why I have no real ambition to be an administrator. Wrangling teachers is like herding cats and sometimes, when the screws of NCLB are being turned and the district offices (and front offices) are looking to you to make academic magic occur on a data-driven level, it becomes exhaustive.

Give me kids any day of the week. I mean I do PD because 1) I can and 2) because I believe I have something worth offering. No magic bullets, but some good, sound tools that can help classroom teachers improve their own classroom practice while simultaneously taking more joy and positive, fulfilling, meaningful efficacy from the work of being a teacher. I do PD with a win/win mentality in mind.

But I work with kids because I love it. That’s where the soulful stuff is for me… and that makes all the difference between this being a job and this being my life’s work.

Working with adults in a school system — sometimes it’ll drive ya bonkers. I just don’t know why I can’t seem to remember that more often.

Yep, gimme kids any day of the week.

Whenever any other adult walks into my classroom, things change. Why? Cause classrooms are fishbowls and when a new species enters the tank, the environment changes.

Sure, in some ways, things will revert back to normal. Especially if I, at the front of the room, keep an even keel, and keep rolling on with business as usual. (Which I usually do. I have sort of given up on dog and pony shows a long time ago… but when you are a young teacher and you think that your job is on the line when a “boss” walks in, you get tense and start ascending Bloom’s taxonomy as if climbing this academic Kilimanjaro was the only thing ever that you were hired to do. What? The VP is coming? Quick kids, start to SYNTHESIZE!!! It’s such a joke.)

However, kids who are normally energetic and enthusiastic will clam up and in my experience, the “high end” of class gets lost – or at least tamped down. Sure, a few of the most bubbling personalities will still participate and share their “voice” with the room but most kids will — especially when there are people in suits or business attire in the class — remain in their own little quiet, one-word response bubble.

Classes where the teachers don’t have classroom management though… they are often exposed. I mean a teacher that can’t get Jimmy to sit down when the principal is not in the room is a teacher that feels embarrassed and threatened when the VP is in the room watching Jimmy defy classroom protocol.

But the thing is, the VP’s often look at the teacher as if it’s “the educator’s” fault that Jimmy won’t sit down, be quiet and do some work. Why the VP doesn’t enter the room with the attitude that, “Hey, this is my school and I am here to support the teachers and if Jimmy won’t get on the bus, I need to do something about Jimmy,” is beyond me.

Uhm, maybe, the teacher could use some back-up?

But no, VP’s enter the room looking for “our” problems… as if the problems they see in their teachers’ rooms are not “their” problems as well.

Goodness how I’d love to see the tables turned on this one though. I mean how great would it be to see the entire school board walk into my VP’s office? I wonder if she would carry on in the same way as she would if it was just a P.E. teacher who had popped by.

And I wonder if they had only spent 7 minutes in her office (with a check sheet in hand, of course — the rubric for good Vice Principalling… I mean who hasn’t memorized that?) if she would feel as if she was being fairly evaluated and assessed by her “bosses”.

No notice. No prior awareness of what was even on the check sheet. Just BOOM! a surprise little visit. In, then out, then gone… the only lasting impression being an air of slight disapproval from each of the Board Members.

Of course, this folly bleeds upwards. Why? Because instead of supporting her, they come in with an attitude of “looking for her faults”. And she thinks to herself, “If you know so much, then you trying doing this damn job!”

Don’t you just love how everyone feels as if they can do your job better than you can do it yourself? Parents, principals, kids, they all think, What schmoe couldn’t do a better job than the schlub they currently have in room 6213?

And when I look at the work my school board does, my VP does, the science and math and history and P.E. teachers do, I pretty much think the same thing, don’t I.

Yep, I am a hypocrite. Don’t judge me but I will judge you.

Ya gotta love school mentality, right?

The other day the Principal and a Vice Principal came into my room un-announced. Why? To do “informal observations”.

I was given no notice, no inkling — didn’t even know they were in this wing of our school.

And still during the middle of 6th period they popped in, each took a position on one side of the room — checksheet in hand — and they observed.

I was at the front of the room at the time just having finished up giving a cloze quiz about the current book we are reading. My front board was kinda blank but that’s only because I needed the space for the next part of class where I’d be using the white board to draw a few things, jot down some of their own notes, and blah, blah… you know, I was just planning on using my board.

Thing was, at the time when they walked in, I wasn’t really using the board.

And the fact is, I can’t say, all that much was going on other than the fact that every kid was in their seat with their head down working.

The P and the VP didn’t say boo to me. And they were really only in my room for less than 7 minutes. They took notes but I never saw them. They “observed” things but I have no idea what they noted. Essentially, they did a fly-by, took a snapshot of my class and left.

Of course, the paranoid person in me thinks, “Hey wait! That’s just a snapshot. You gotta stick around to see this great stuff I have planned for later in the class. And then you have to see how it fits in with this really cool thing I am gonna do next Tuesday. And when you take it in context of what we did last Wednesday and you see how it relates to what I have planned in February, it really will add up to something.”

But alas, all they saw was the snapshot. And I gotta say, I feel a bit cheated by it. I mean on one hand, yes, give me 5 minutes in a class and I can tell a great deal. I do believe that is true. From the sense of classroom management and so on, 5 minutes can “tell” a little bit.

But does it really “inform”? Naw. And when they do this silent, stealthy drop-in, drop-outs, is there a teacher on staff that ever really feels good about it?

What did they see?
Do I need to go explain myself?
Will what they saw be “used against me” at a later date?

Maybe they loved it? If so, it would boost my morale if they let me know.
Maybe they hated it? Well, how might I improve?

But silence? That’s the worst!

Was I just caught with my pants down?

During a class discussion the other day the subject of alcoholism came up. I asked my 2nd period class, “How many people have, in their opinion, an alcoholic relative in their family?”

75% of the kids raised their hands.

“How many people in this room have seen a beer commercial?” (They are 9th graders, kids that are 14 for the most part.)

All hands went up.

“How many people in this room have seen over 10 beer commercials?”

75% of the hands went up.

“How many people in this room have seen over 50 beer commercials?”

A heck of a lot of hands went up. More boys at this juncture. (Watching sports on TV I am presume.) Remember, these are 14 year olds.

So we outlaw tobacco ads on tv and make the tobacco companies pay for their own “Don’t smoke” campaigns yet booze gets a complete and total pass when it comes to direct marketing to our kids? A marketing they do, mind you, with the highest hopes of turning our young people into future, lifelong customers.

Otherwise known as addicts. I mean, alcoholics. I mean, er, responsible drinkers.

Look, I find beer commercials funny and entertaining and even kinda innovative. But the damage that alcoholics do to themselves, their family and society? Not quite so Ha-Ha.

And why do I have a feeling that my kids could name more brands of beer than they could members of the Supreme Court, Congress and so on? Matter of fact, I bet Joe Biden would get pummeled by the suave Dos Equis guy in a face recognition contest.

Bottoms up.

While perusing the web, I ran across this article which claims studies prove that taking the SAT in a crowded room is a detriment to student scores and performance.

They call this the”the N-effect.” Basically, as the article says, the larger the “N”—the number of participants involved in a task—the worse the outcome for the individuals who are participating.

Hmm… really?

So if a 4 hour stretch of time in a crowded room is detrimental to test scores, WHAT ABOUT LEARNING IN CROWDED CLASSROOMS OVER THE COURSE OF AN ENTIRE YEAR?!

Kindergarten with 29 kids per class.
Middle schools with 38 kids per class.
High schools with 41 per class.

Does anyone care to do a study on this? Matter of fact, I am sure there are scores of them. But then again, isn’t this simply self-evident stuff? I mean teaching at 39 to 1 versus teaching at 22 to 1 is an immense difference… and one sure way to improve the quality of the educator is to reduce the amount of students on their roster.

A fair teacher is a better teacher with they are not forced to teach in impacted classrooms.
A good teacher is a better teacher with they are not forced to teach in impacted classrooms.
A great teacher is a better teacher with they are not forced to teach in impacted classrooms.

A bad teacher — well, even they are able to be less bad if they have less kids. Or at least they negatively affect less kids when they have less kids so there’s even some benefit in that, right?

Just remember, every time you hear the term “budget cuts” one thing that surely follows is larger class sizes… and that’s not good for anybody.

So how in the world can we affect the N-effect in our classrooms?

So the school year is a few weeks in now and we just had one of those big, long English department meetings. You know the kind, where people gripe, complain, moan, go off topic and stray into conversations about how they are the best educational practitioners ever and back in 1981 I was doing this and blah, blah, blah.

Put it this way, if you do not know what type of meeting I am talking about, consider yourself blessed. We have good peeps on our staff and we are all working hard… but put 27 people in a room when there are still a buncha pockets of sheer chaos in different areas of campus and you are gonna hear some stuff.

Essentially, if there was a theme (and I am big on themes — I make my kids find them, analyze them, write about them and so on), it would be, “We don’t have enough.”

We don’t have enough desks. Due to the budget cuts we lost educators and now there are a bunch of teachers with 43 per class with only 34 desks in the room.

We don’t have enough teachers. Some people are carrying more than 200 students on their total roster this year. (And that’s a hell of a lot! Too many in fact… no doubt!)

We don’t have enough books. Being that about 30% of our kids didn’t return the books they checked out last year, and we have no money to order new books, we’re short materials.

We don’t have enough administrators. Yep, you heard me say it. There just aren’t enough hands on deck right now and being that we switched from SASE to ARIES and it’s giving major problems to everyone — and the guy who did the master schedule for the past decade just retired — my admins just spent last Saturday and Sunday on campus still working out schedules and the such. Admins aren’t the enemy… they have it just as tough… but they unfortunately can devolve into number crunching bureaucrats… and there is nothing more problem than number crunching bureaucrats who do not have enough number crunching bureaucrats around them to properly crunch the numbers like good number crunching bureaucrats are often called upon to do.

Essentially, We don’t have enough, we don’t have enough, we don’t have enough!

And so we must make up for it in spirit.

So it’s the first day of class this week — I am teaching ALL freshman this year in an attempt to try and get a whole host of kids off to a good high school start with the ambition that a good leap out of the gate will help carry enough positive momentum for them to really see things through and graduate. (And graduation rate is a percentage we’d really LOVE to improve ’round these parts. Seems 50/50 isn’t quite what the state is hoping for in terms of odds.)

So my little angels are sitting there in third period, about 5 seconds after the bell rings, in a combination of freshman-ic fear, hope, excitement and “HOLY HORMONES, woulddya look at how big this place is — and these other kids are” type of silence. They are waiting for me to begin and no matter how much I smile and try to be warm and welcoming, they still are some of the quietest little mice on the planet. Things are just way too new for them around a huge urban school like this and very few ninth graders come in on Day 1 carrying much of an attitude.

Oh, they’ll grow it — that’s for sure — but on the first day of school it’s pretty chill.

Anyway, two girls suddenly walk in my room and take a seat a wee bit after the bell has sounded. And one of them is pregnant. That’s right, she’s pregnant.

Now, I’ve had students get pregnant during the school year (happens all over the country) but I’ve never had a freshman walk into school the first day of class already in her 2nd or 3rd trimester.

Of course, everyone tried not to stare… but they did. So she took a seat, I smiled and said “hi” to both the girls and that was that.

Then 3 minutes later as I am butchering names while calling role (I swear the attendance sheets should be spelled phonetically) the two girls who walked in late stood up, came up to me and asked, “Is this 12th grade?”

“Uhm, lemme see you schedule,” I answered. “Nope, you’re in the wrong room.”

And they left, the pregnant teen having to cross the front of the room a second time parading her little bundle of joy twice for all to see in a space of less than 4 minutes

Talk about an icebreaker activity for the new fish in the tank. Sent a “hope that ain’t me one day” chill across the skin of every girl in the room.

Sometimes classroom lessons just appear out of thin air.

So this is the letter I typed today in my 3rd period class to my principal:

Hi Mr. ___________ (name withheld — but easily googled I am sure),

Mr. Alan

A few things…

1) This is totally true.
2) Jose’s comment went over like an absolute lead balloon. The room went from one of comfort, learning and emotional safety to one of immediate tension and awkwardness. Everyone instantly became uncomfortable.
3) I was flummoxed. The comment was just so inappropriate, so out of left-field, so uncharacteristic of anything that goes on in my room I felt thrown. In my more than a decade of teaching, if I had to rank it, I’d say this was the most inappropriate classroom comment ever uttered in my room. And if you work with teens long enough, you know that you’ve heard some wildly inappropriate things.

The point of the activity was to examine words/phrases and to see if the denotations carry more weight than the connotations or vice versa. My examples on the board were about illuminating the difference between calling someone an “accounting manager” or a “bean counter”. (Similar denotations, wildly different connotations.) So then I had to ask myself, are students today this wildly desensitized to a sense of context, to gauging appropriateness? And in my small effort to try and cut Jose some slack by justifying his actions to myself (i.e.”Oh, Alan, maybe he just didn’t know.”) I realized, “Come on, who am I kidding? Jose was simply pushing the envelope, trying to test my limits. Don’t rationalize it. He was out of bounds.”

So I bounced him out of class with the above letter in hand and told him he wasn’t allowed to come back until the principal had answered his question for him. Such a thoughtful response, I said, required a higher authority on the matter.

Terror ran through the blood of all my other students when I sent Jose on his way. I actually had to lighten up the mood in class because kids mistakenly assumed I was furious with them as a result of something one of their peers did (I was not) — and the tension was simply too thick, a real pink elephant — so we talked about the denotation versus the connotation of the phrase “fly on the wall” and I briefly chatted about how much fun it would be to able to eavesdrop on the conversation Jose was going to have with the principal of our school about his classroom question.

Within a few minutes, things became more relaxed again.

You know, once a person graduates from high school, the days spent in our classrooms often blend into amorphous blobs of scattered recollections. For some reason though, I have a feeling Jose will always have one particular day in English class well-etched into his memory.

As we all know, you can’t be an effective teacher unless you have a line in the sand. And once it’s crossed, there must be consequences. My guess is that by lunchtime, all of my 9th graders will have heard this story, too. Gossip travels faster than a stolen teacher’s test with the answer key does around these parts.

And I expect very few behavior problems in 3rd period for quite some time. LOL!