How much should I, as a teacher, be expected to do between 8:00 a.m and 3:00 p.m.?

And don’t those expectations change depending on what is going on between 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. in a student’s life?

Some kids come into my room ready to learn. With the tools to learn.

And some don’t.

Some need me to be play the role of their parent, their advisor, their taskmaster, their shoulder to cry on, and so on.

Others just need me/want me to be their “English teacher”. (And by that I mean the person who guides them in skills pertaining to advancing their abilities in the realm of Language Arts: reading literature, writing, discussing philosophy, applying 21st century skills, that sort of thing.)

If I only take on the role of being their “English teacher” (as I define it above), am I being derelict in my duties?

If I take on more than the job of being their “English teacher” am I over-stepping my boundaries?

I don’t know. And worse, I am not sure where I can turn for a credible answer.

After all, the state standards, those things I have been hired to teach (and which are supposed to instruct me), speak nothing of showing empathy for a student who, for example, just learned their favorite uncle was sent to prison for a decade. (A recent event in my teaching day.) On the other hand, if I allow this event to be an excuse which exempts the student from working in class, where does that leave me?

This is what is so silly about bubble tests: they do not take into account the ingredients which make up the stew. They just assess the stew… and then the finger gets pointed at teachers as if we are the only chefs contributing.

In fact, I’d say while we can most certainly be one of the most important contributors, we’re not number one. Not by a long shot.

What goes on between 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. in a student’s life greatly dictates what goes on between 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. ( I gotta give a shout-out to JoAnne for raising this point in response to a previous blog post of mine!)

And anyone who tries to tell you that it doesn’t is trying to sell you something. And in my opinion, none of this is “excuse making” as some hard-liners would have you believe.

To the hard-liners, I think karma should give them a migraine headache and see if they can perform their job at the same ability as they would without the migraine.

That’ll learn them some compassion for “mitigating factors in performance”.

BTW, Happy Cinco de Mayo! And for those of you who can expect low attendance on either May 5th (getting a jump on the partying!) or on May 6th (too much partying to get to class), remember, the bubble tests don’t care… so STEP UP!

I work hard at trying to provide learning opportunities that can be fun. For sure it’s a “special sauce” in my teaching methodology because I deeply believe that people try harder – and that there is more “stickiness” to education – when students are actually enjoying the work they are being asked to do.

Fact is, figuring out how to marry meaningfulness to rigor through “fun” is how I spend a lot of my prep time for lessons. Making school “enjoyable” is not a dirty word. (Though you wouldn’t know it if you look at the textbooks, the bubble sheet tests, or even the content standards. Sheesh, could they be more boring? Particularly the bubble tests. It’s like they overtly seek to disengage students as if triumphing over the dread of the content being tested is a academic skill for today’s kids.)

In my estimation, discounting the element of “enjoyability”, “meaningfulness” and “pleasure” is an Achille’s heel in ours school.

And rigor does not have to be sacrificed at the altar of student enjoyment. (Trust me, project-based learning where kids actually have to “create” something requires far more depth of knowledge and diversified skill sets than choosing A, B, C, or D 75 times in a row.)

But often it seems like we forget the perspective of the kids when we craft our lesson plans.

As a student, I want to sit in the room of a chemistry teacher who “blows something up” in order to bring a lesson to life.

As a student, I want to sit in the room of a history teacher who figures out a way for me to smell the stench of a blood-stained battlefield.

As a student, I want to be intrigued, challenged and engaged. I like surprises. I like experiences. I like it when I like what is going on around me.

And I don’t like it when I don’t. Life is interesting. School can be invigorating. The world is an amazingly complex, interesting and awe-inspiring place.

Don’t let it die on the classroom vine.

Engross your students. Gross out your students. But know that if you want to better reach your students, I say, don’t violate the law of basic kid-ness: they like to enjoy what they are doing.

After all, you catch more flies with honey, right?

Have we not brought this on ourselves? Truly, it’s our own fault we are mired in this whole “measuring teacher’s effectiveness” mess anyway.

And why? Because we, as teachers, have run amok.

We had a chance to police ourselves, we had a chance to be our brother’s keeper, we had a chance to self-regulate in a way that resembled sensibility.

We had decades to do so. But we got ahold of too much rope and now we have hung ourselves. Our negative fringes need to be reigned in, our performance needs to be recognized as something that is not above improvement nor reproach, our sense of team is being torn asunder by the “I’s” who think they are above having to be a part of a team, and we need to do a better job at our job — like all aspects of American education do.

We can point the figure at every other quadrant of public schooling: parents, community, societal values, administration, the federal government, the budget and on and on… and be right about the blame we lay!

Yet still, that does not change the fact that we must take ownership over our own shortcomings and figure out a way we, as teachers, can better serve the needs of the next generation of student.

And if it comes with some professional uncomfortableness, so effin’ be it!

Teaching is NOT about us, the teachers; first and foremost it’s about the students. In our field we know this, we see this, we bleed this.

We live this.

But not all of us of do. And a small cancer has spread to the point where it’s no longer small.

Clearly, the campus duds must be de-dudded and we gotta start bringing better game to the table. All of us do.

(BTW, NCLB is not even worth mentioning to counter this argument because NCLB has been a farce and you’re not gonna find any love from me for the calamity that this exercise in folly has wrought for us all.)

Now the thing is, people get uproarious about feeling accused. Chill out because if you are reading this, you probably are not one of the people at whom I am pointing the finger. Those folks rarely, if ever, read blogs on nings seeking out answers on their own time as to how to improve their craft or stay up to date on the latest policy measures (much less looking for a means whereby they can improve a lesson plan).

But if we can’t acknowledge that something is rotten in the state of Denmark then we have absolutely no chance in hell of ever improving it.

It begins with us taking a look in the mirror and being humble (and realistic) about the fact that we can get better.

We all seem to believe, as teachers, that good assessment is an asset to improving our ability to elevate student learning in our classrooms. How do I know what a kid knows unless I assess what it is I am seeking for them to be able to prove they understand and can do?

And once I assess and reflect on the student’s performance, I can chart a new path for extended growth.

Because growth never stops in education. There is no end line to any of this.

However, if you take away my ability to assess my kids (no formal measurements at all) I believe I will be a lesser teacher. By a lot! Nope, I am not Socrates. Or Jesus or Buddha or whatever other person you can think of that was able to turn student water into wine without formal feedback. (Unless Socrates actually gave 5 paragraphs essays that I didn’t know about. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate egg on our face — Socrates assigned hamburger essays on truth, beauty and nobility — the documents were just misfiled amongst the ruins. Yikes!)

No, I am just a high school English teacher in Los Angeles, California and I use multiple measures to gain insight into the knowledge and performance of the kids in my class.

Why can’t the same be applied to us as teachers on the whole?

No one measurement in my class ever gives the whole story to me as to a kid’s learning anyway. (Which is why high stakes tests don’t really strike me as the cat’s meow.)

I use multiple measures. From quizzes to personal contact to project-based learning projects to traditional summative assessment tools, I use multiple approaches to gain the knowledge I seek.

And I find that knowledge valuable because it better enables me to figure out ways to teach my students.

And giving an F is always the last resort. (As firing would be in the plan I envision.) But i do give some F’s. (And we do need to fire some folks.)

But I give a lot more A’s and I work exceedingly hard to recognize good work much more so than I do at demonizing poor work.

Why can’t we transpose these ideas to our own profession? We certainly have, in my estimation, proven the need to do it.

And if we want to point fingers at who has demonstrated this need, collectively, it is us. We have proven the need for our effectiveness/job performance/professional impact to be measured/assessed/evaluated/judged – choose whatever language you want – ourselves.

Individually, you may not feel you need it but holistically, when it comes to American education at large, this need is glaring.

The only real question left for me is, why do I feel so alone when I type this?

How about a bubble test for politicians? I mean since they are so accurate and insightful — and can be used to determine so much authentic insight into actual professionalism — why not make the people who are making our students student up to the scntron have to step up to the scantron sheet themself?

I’ll go easy on the — it’ll be a simple T or F bubble test.

Choose A for True and B for False.

Number 2 pencils only please.

1. Did you fulfill all of your campaign promises in a timely, thorough manner?
T or F?

2. Did you balance the budget?
T or F?

3. Did you have sex with a goat in the bathroom of a travel stop along the highway at 2:00 a.m.?
T or F?

Please add questions to the list as you see fit. I figure a 100 question bubble test should give us just the data we need to determine the effectiveness of our elected leaders.

And we could also devise them for school superintendents, principals, and parents, too. Think of the accountability!!

ETS, watch out… I am gonna take down your empire!!!

To many students, the holiday break of 2009 is long gone. But I have a student who will never forget it. That’s because his uncle strangled his aunt to death — and then shot himself in the head in a murder suicide — with his nephew, my ninth grader, in the next room.

And yes, my student heard the whole thing.

Of course I am setting my goal to do all the humanistic work I can to make sure this kid, well… doesn’t go off the deep end. But how his story will play out is a great unknown right now.

And yet, how will my work with him be measured this year? By the standardized test scores he delivers on the bubble tests we administer to probe his aptitudes and capacities.

Really, that’s it. What are his test scores?

Fair to him? Naw.
Fair to judge me as a teacher by his scores? Naw. And yet, that’s how the district, the county and the state are going to measure my professionalism this year.

Next time you see low test scores and think stinky teachers are to blame for low performance, well… perhaps there’s a human being behind each of those data-driven numbers we offer to the bean counters.

Jobs are gonna be slashed next year as a result of our NCLB probation status. But are the measurements really apples to apples?

A student witness to murder-suicide in the age of NCLB… no excuses, just results.

Let’s be honest… it’s really hard to give a damn about a kid’s grades when a kid doesn’t give a damn themself.

I know I am supposed to be mature, compassionate, professional and perpetually hopeful and encouraging but wow, sometimes it is just so hard when you are being asked to care about the performance of a student at a level that exceeds their own concern. I mean after having just done grades and participating in a school-wide dialogue about “low performing students”, I feel like very few people want to acknowledge a hard truth about being a teacher in this day and age.

We are being asked to care at a level that exceeds the caring shown by 1) the student themself and 2) a host of “other” adults in many of these students’ lives.

I think we all know what I mean when I say that it’s supremely challenging to care about a kid’s grade when they themselves couldn’t give a flying fudgesicle about their own academic performance. This aspect of our job is almost self-explanatory.

But who else is supposed to care… besides me?

To the administrators and the district, every F I give is more a piece of data than it is a real kid. Same with the politicians and such. I mean they know there are real faces behind the grades — and they pay lip service to the idea that these are real people — but at the end of the day, they see trends and charts and graphs and data much more than they see real people.

And the way that they are slashing budgets and cutting services and resources and programs and personnel (and on and on and on, geesh, what aren’t they cutting nowadays?) it’s hard for me to buy into the idea that many of these folks really care about kids the way I believe they ought — or care about them more than I do.

What about the parents? (I am not even going to go there right now because it’s a can of worms that I don’t even know how to properly address. Just SO complicated.)

Now some teachers relish giving the F, as if it’s their own little revenge on a semester filled with grief and aggravation. “Ha!” they think. “You may have tortured me, but with this F, I get to throw a wee bit of gunk into your future karma… SO TAKE THAT YOU LITTLE PUNK!”

Other teachers feel sadness about giving an F to a kid that demonstrates no concern for their own academic well-being. They give F’s with a, “This F is gonna cook you in a way that you don’t even realize and I hate to do it but you’ve boxed me in — there’s no other way.”

And then, once you have been doing this long enough, you hear about how as a teacher, you shouldn’t take it home with you. How it is just part of the gig. It’s part and parcel. You learn the Q-TIP principal.

Quit
Taking
It
Personally

Well, I am still waiting for the point in my career when that actually happens. And when it does, isn’t that also a signal it might be time to leave the classroom?

So what is to be done when a student farts in class?

Hey, don’t laugh, this is a serious academic issue.

The way I see it, there are a coupla options.

1) Try to pretend it didn’t happen. Of course, if it’s stinky one, the boys sitting in and around the — let’s pretend I teach in a church — the boys sitting in and around the “pew” are gonna keep disrupting whatever progress you want to make in your lesson with commentary and insights about the aroma.

Of course, when you try to actually teach an ELA lesson on the need to use precise, descriptive, vibrant vocabulary in English class, you get papers back that lay flat and are filled with bland vanilla. But let a kid break wind and all of a sudden, the vocabulary being bandied about the room would make a lovelorn poet from the Romantic era proud of its richness and poignancy.

2) Scold the perpetrator. Now for me, this one would never work. First of all, I am still immature enough to find farts kinda funny so to actually try and castigate a kid would probably result in me cracking a smile in the middle of trying to keep a stern face. (Note: I think there is a fart joke in almost every book of young adult fiction I’ve yet written. And the new books that’ll be out next year, well… let’s just say it doesn’t look like the streak is in any danger of being broken right now.)

3) Pretend nothing actually happened and keep pressing on with the lesson. Probably the best route, when all is said and done, but meta-cognitively, an educator must know that for up to 180 seconds after student cheese-cutting, a teacher shouldn’t relay any truly valuable academic information — or else you will need to make a plan to re-teach it. After all, one good blasting of some backdoor breeze from a kid in class is enough to render even the most diligent of AP kids out of sorts for a while.

I guess the question I, as the teacher, have to really ask myself before I go down the road of condemnation for public flatulence is, to what end am I going to reprimand a student for this stuff? Am I going to send a kid to the Dean? Am I going to give the kid detention? Come on, let’s be honest, the more I keep the main subject of the classroom on student gas, the more tickled the kids are that we are 1) talking about this and 2) not talking about things like appositive phrases. I mean I have boys that would gladly engage in a 20 minute analysis on the type of wind currents able to be generated through the human digestive tract — the tone, the pitch, the pungency, the types of foods best suited to achieve optimum results — and if I were to give fart homework, I have a feeling my some of my most reluctant students would suddenly turn into verifiable scholars.

You want student engagement in the classroom? Try a Socratic Seminar on bottom blasts from the big brown horn. Guaranteed participation from all kinds of kids.

You want to teach vocabulary? Use farts. They’ll never forget the definition of turgidity again.

And not to be sexist, but how come I’ve never once had a freshman interrupt class with the declaration, “Ew, Kimberly farted!”

I get, “Ew, Michael farted!”
I get, “Ew, Joesph farted!”
I get, “Ew, both Michael and Joseph farted!”

But never the girls. Hmmm… worth more investigation.

The Conundrum of Student Farts… in my opinion, it’s an issue that needs more high level discussion.

In addition to doing Professional Development for schools and districts, I also do student assemblies (with my YA author hat on.) And the truth is, while I like doing to adult events, the kids just smoke the grown-ups on the “fun for me” scale… it’s not even close.

Anyway, I did a really cool, very well received student assembly last year at Wilson High School in Long Beach, CA. Essentially, a great teacher over there named Devon Day nudged and nudged me to come, and when I was able to make the schedule work, I did.

The kids were great. The staff was nice. All in all, it was pretty good stuff.

I only mention it because this is the same Wilson High that has been in the news lately… for all the wrong reasons. Tragically, one of their students was fatally shot and killed after their homecoming game. It was front page stuff out this way.

A big theme of mine that day was about choices and trying to advocate for education over violence. As the author of the really popular YA book Homeboyz, a book many of their students just love, I feel it is essential to make sure kids are crystal clear as to why I wrote the book. It’s a cautionary tale, violent and raw and all too real. Studnets, like moths to the flame, are entranced by gangs in this day and age but this stuff ain’t no joke — that’s part of my presentations. Anway, Devon just sent me the following email as her school wrestles with how to move on in the aftermath of this tragedy.

Alan,

Devon

On one hand, I am thrilled that a great teacher like Devon finds my work worthy enough to bring into her own classroom to try and teach and reach her kids. On the other hand, I am sad and empty.

I mean I live under the delusion that when I do free assemblies like the one I did for Devon’s school that it’s because it’s gonna make an impact and kids are gonna get it and things are going to change. Unfortunately, I do not have nearly the power I wish I did to help young people avoid the violence which plagues young America today.

It’s depressing. No matter what I do I know that individually it will never be enough. (I mean, I am working on 4 hours of sleep as I type this right now and my voice is so raw from teaching and speaking I am scared of creating scar tissue on my vocal cords — but I just haven’t had a break for weeks).

And yet still, we forge on. What more can we all do but forge on? Not give in to cynicism and bitterness. Not turn to anger or hate. All I guess we can do is put one foot in front of the other.

My heart goes out to the family and friends of Melody Ross… and to the community of Long Beach Wilson. As adults in this world, we have got to find a way to do better by our kids.

Blame is easy. Solutions are a whole different matter.

This weekend, let’s all remember that bullets just took another young student’s life and no matter how much I think about it, it really just doesn’t make any sense.

Good luck, Wilson High. Hope you know there are people in your corner everywhere even if you do not see them.

The University of California is now mulling charging different rates for different majors. In this article, they cite the example of the engineering student. Because such a kid uses more tangible and costly resources in their field of study, colleges are now mulling the idea of making that student pay more for their schooling. For example, since engineering majors erect 20 foot long concrete canoes using university money for class projects (and the university foots the bill for the raw materials) it costs the school a lot more to educate this student than it would, say, an English major (because that kid pretty much buys all their own books and taps primarily into the university’s brain power to pursue their degree and not their wet cement supply as well as their brain power).

I gotta say, it seems sort of fair to me. I mean when I go out to eat, they don’t charge me the same price for lobster as they do a hot dog. If the “goods” cost more to provide to the customer, the customer almost always is asked to take on the extra burden of price. Besides, people everywhere across this country are used to paying different prices for different things. If anything, I kinda gotta ask, “How come they didn’t start doing this years ago?”

Of course, the question becomes, “Will the more expensive majors see a decline in enrollment?” I am not sure. But I’d speculate that the more expensive majors will typically offer higher paying job prospects as well. Compare the engineer’s average pay to the average philosophy major’s average pay and a cost benefit analysis would most probably show some type of corollary between an “it’ll cost ya more” type of degree to a “it’ll earn ya more” type of profession.

And what about the more popular majors? Shouldn’t they also pay a premium in this land of supply and demand? I mean right now the Toyota Prius, a car that get 48 mpg, sells for above sticker price because so many people want to buy a hybrid car. On the other hand, a Chevy Tahoe, an SUV that gets like 11 mpg, has all sorts of crazy discounts being offered. I mean business majors are more popular than ever — why not charge more for a business degree than a poli sci degree? Supply and demand, right?

So the question becomes, are universities about to charge a la carte prices instead of buffet style admission depending on the major chosen? Seems that way.

One thing that is sure to come is the outrage from the kids that are going to see their tuition raised yet again. It’s like the airline traveller that has to pay for bags.

In times of budget issues people sharpen their pencils. Only question now is, am I entitled to a refund? I’ve never built a cement canoe in my life. Actually, wouldn’t a cement canoe sink? Guess that’s why we need engineering majors in the first place — the only time us English folks often have concerns about canoes is when Huck and Jim are trapped in one with a pair of rapscallions!