In case you missed it, I have taken over Alan’s blog… and will not relent.

Bubble.

Bubble.

Bubble.

It’s a data-driven world and with the right data, it doesn’t even matter what human beings are actually in our school’s seats as smart data can inform any instruction.

Bubble.

Bubble.

Bubble.

–Whit Little, a man in educational control.

I had a chat with a Superintendent the other day, a guy who earned a PhD at the age of 36. (gotta be somewhat bright, right?) And he told me that his high school counselor once asked him during his senior year, “So, what are you going to do?”

And he replied. “I dunno. Maybe the Air Force.” To which the counselor replied, “Good… cause these grades demonstrate that you have almost no chance to succeed in college at all.”

It was a statement made to him more than 40 years ago by someone who worked at his school. And he still carries the conversation around with him in his head to this day.

That led to the tale of the woman who was thinking about heading into nursing school, but she felt her low math and science grades might hold her back. To which a teacher replied, “They should. I wouldn’t want any nurse with these kind of grades providing any medical services to me.”

Neither of the two people claimed the adult was being sarcastic. But perhaps these adults were… and their sense of “jokiness” was just simply missed by the kids. Does that excuse them?

Sarcasm can be a dangerous weapon in the mouth of an educator. And I bet if we started taking calls from people who were once cut to shreds on the inside by a teacher who was “just kidding around” our phones would be ringing of the hook.

Laughing with kids is good, good stuff. Laughing at them can be something else entirely and when it comes to teasing, one teacher’s “meant-nothing-by-it” joke can become another student’s “that was really, really hurtful” insult.

Moral of the story: never use sarcasm… just belittle the students directly.

Why should teachers think about using Project-Based Learning right out of the gate during the 1st quarter of school? Here’s why.

I gotta give kudos to my VP. Earlier this week, I walked in to the front office – by the reception desk, no less – and heard a parent SCREAMING at the top of her lungs.

Dropping F-Bombs like a belligerent sailor.

All while wearing a baby on her back.

I swear, it’s all true.

Let’s start with the baby. It was in a carrying sling, a baby bjorn of some sort. Yet even though the kid was about 8 months old, I’d guess, it was being shuttled around our campus like a biology textbook.

(Note: I didn’t see milk, diapers, a hat for the sun, or wipes. But I don’t want to jump to conclusions. Perhaps there was a diaper bag filled with junk in her car. I’ll cut her some slack for a moment.)

Now Mom was obviously livid. And why? Because her daughter was being suspended from school. Why? Because her daughter popped off to a teacher in the middle of class. Literally EXPLODED on her teacher, dropping F-Bombs like, well… dropping ‘em like a belligerent sailor.

Hmmm, I wonder where she ever learned this type of behavior?

Our VP though, was a real pro. She tried to speak calmly. As the mom escalated, she de-escalated. She courteously asked the mom to lower her voice, watch her language and mind the fact that there were 25 other people around including a bunch of students.

“F-Bomb that!” was the reply.

At that point the VP explained that she was going to have to call campus security because discussing complaints in this fashion was not appropriate nor in accord with school policy. (And she did it without the sarcastic bite I probably would have applied.) The fact is, this mom was reckless and almost seemed on the border of violence.

And that’s with an 8 month old on her back! The 16 year old daughter, of course, just stood there next to her mother as if she were the real victim – and her mom was entirely right.

See, the thing is, my school gets run through the mud of the media in terrible ways and if you were to simply read the headlines or view our standardized test scores, you’d think all of us on campus were a bunch of unprofessional oafs who couldn’t teach a fish to swim.

Yet, do the bubble tests measure any of the extenuating circumstances which play a definite role in academic performance? Do the tests that ETS produces take into account a mom with a mouth full of F-Bombs?

Clearly, in my opinion, this lady was on the border of needing social services to intervene. Based on what I saw, I think there’s at least a reason to investigate whether or not this person is actually fit to be the guardian of her children.

Yet my school, we take all comers. If you were to look at this kids IEP I have a feeling you’d find a troubled history in school from way back when. A high school that wanted to elevate its test scores would try and re-route kids like this to “other” institutions. (Trust me, it happens.) But we don’t pull that nonsense. We try to provide all comers with an education. Of course we could do a better job of it – but who couldn’t? Yet, it’s the end of the year and some of our seniors are making plans to go to some pretty heavy-duty 4 year colleges… so at least there’s a path within our school for those who are determined to find it to actually take something from the time they spend in our halls.

Clearly, though, we’re not miracle workers. And even more clear is the idea that there are about a zillion factors that go into “making a student”.

And one day, when that 8 month old turns into a 16 year old, well… we can only pray, right?

These are the kids of our city. And this is what we, the teachers are facing, in trying to educate them. Nope, we don’t bat 1.000. Not even close.

I just spent a whole bunch of time talking about PBL (Project-Based Learning). Yet, at the end of the day, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Just one question: Where were these cutting edge-thinkers back when I was in elementary/middle/high school?

Okay, college, too? (Think about it… people who majored in English Lit because they loved the Romantics versus frat boys at keg parties… you do the wedgie math!)

If this isn’t worth an A in some class at school then really… what is?

The Brilliance of Wedgie-Proof Underwear needs to be academically validated!

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.)

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.)

One of the reasons I consider it so important for teachers to try and finish the school year in a “strong” fashion is simply out of self-preservation. The fact is, teaching is tough. And the year is long and hard. And we are not always at our best.

Plus, when you add in a dose of the dire news we are all inevitably going to be reading/hearing about for the upcoming 2010/2011 school year (for example, I just heard rumors we might go as high as 43 to 1 on the student teacher ratio due to budget cuts on my campus), you can get demoralized.

And feel disempowered.

But in a way, this sentiment is an illusion. Sure, there are many things we cannot control in our teaching universe… but there are many things we can as well.

Choose to focus on the things that are within your realm of being able to control. It’s one recipe for staving off the wolves of educational despair.

When you strap it up and work your butt off bell to bell all the way to end of the year, you feel a certain personal dignity that can’t be stolen away from you. And when you work in a chaotic, frenzied, dysfunctional world where up is down and buffonishness trumps common sense, feeling as if you are making a positive contribution matters, despite the events going on all around you.

It actually matters a lot. In fact, it might be all the difference in the world.

Now of course, we owe it to the kids to give them our all, but in reality, a lot of teachers feel dumped on by their districts these days and as a result, they often passive-aggressively take out their own frustrations with their superiors on those that are most easily within lashing-out distance.

i.e. the kids.

My district pink-slipped me? Well, screw them… I ain’t teaching crap for the rest of this year. What are they going to do, fire me?

-Uhm, aren’t you forgetting the needs of the students?
-Aren’t you forgetting your own sense of professionalism?
-Aren’t you forgetting that you are still being paid for a job and just because you can shirk you duties doesn’t mean that you should shirk your duties.

As this year winds down, a lot of “stuff” is going to bubble up. My feeling is that the best defense to preserve your sanity, your dignity and your own personal sense of self can begins with a strong finish to the end of the school year. Refuse to be one of those teachers that just phone it in because at the end of the day, heck, at the end of your life, you’ll be able to look back and at least know that when it came time hey, at least you did what you could.

Trust me, there’s more juice in the fruit of students to be squeezed and wasting it, well… the knowledge that you’ve done so can wear on your soul.

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

When I think back to my own schooling, I realize that nobody taught me note taking. I was just told to “take notes.” Nobody taught me how to annotate a text. I was just provided a highlighter. Nobody taught me how to prioritize tasks, create a smart homework schedule, manage all my obligations and so on.

As a result, I stumbled through high school and college inefficiently… or at least certainly less effectively than I could/should have. Often, I procrastinated until I had to “crash” study for tests… or pull an all-nighter to deliver the goods I owed. (I am a night owl anyway, but staying up until 5:00 am was so common in my life for so, so, so many years that to this day, I can still burn the midnight oil in a way that is almost unnatural. Or so my wife swears.)

All of that changed when I became an AVID teacher. And read Covey. And then recognized that my inability to be efficient and work intelligently was preventing me from achieving so many of the personal and professional goals I longed to attain.

Before AVID, Covey and all the others who have contributed to my conscientious re-framing (let’s be honest, I have gulped down a ton of books on this subject area), I was an inefficient wreck. I guess this is why I use the term re-framing. I needed to re-frame the way I worked top to bottom, keeping what did work well and tossing what didn’t.

Nowadays, of course, I am a lot of unspeakable things but being “an inefficient wreck” is not one of them. I write, speak, blog, teach, and so on. Is it a lot? For sure. However, my life is not characterized by chaos, which is totally ironic because before I recognized I needed to re-frame the manner in which I worked, chaos was the operative word.

It’s almost as if I did not know how to operate

from any other perspective than under the gun, late for a deadline and so on.
Of course, I loved to lie to myself as well and tell myself that, “Hey, you
work better at the last minute anyway,” and things like that.

It calls to mind a line Mark Twain once said: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

But what I really wish, when I look back, is that

someone would have taught me some of the core principles of smart work habits
and efficiency back when I was still a minor. I mean, somewhere, between 4rth
grade and 12th grade, it really would have been nice to learn things
like Cornell note taking, time management, prioritization, and the law of
procrastination. (i.e. it’s stressful, quality often gets sacrificed and the
sense of joy in doing the work is torn asunder by the need to meet a deadline,
come hell or high water.)

It’s like catching an airline flight, in a way. These

days, I always try to be an extra ½ hour early. Why? Because I used to be the
type of person that would try to cut it razor thin and make it to the gate, “just
on time”.

Of course, every moment of the journey to the airport,
going through security, and getting to the gate was a hellish and stressful “race
against the clock” event which made the entire experience tremendously “tense”.
With the extra half hour these days, I am relaxed, I have a buffer and, if there’s
a hiccup in my arrangements, things don’t go nuclear.

And if I am there a half hour early, I can read,

write, make a relaxed phone call and so on. Really, I don’t ever find that I
have wasted any half-hours. And the gray hairs on my head that I did not cause
to sprout, well… it makes it all worth it.

I just wish I wouldn’t have had to go to the school
of hard knocks to learn this stuff… and if school would have taught me these
things, I would have been much better off.

Then again, who wouldn’t?

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.