Letter to a first-year teacher

Dear Rookie,

Because you are reading this, there are a few things I know about you. You’re ambitious, idealistic, and brave. At the moment you’re also anxious, overwhelmed, and quite possibly terrified. And I know one last thing about you: you’re not alone in this endeavor, and you never will be. Whatever heights of fulfillment and depths of disillusionment you experience over the coming year, we’ve all been there. As you plod through the joyous struggle of your very own First Year of Teaching, please take heart in the following.

You will fail. The world will not end. In the sixth grade I asked the prettiest girl in school, Caroline O’Ferrall, if she would go to the fall dance with me. (In retrospect, I was asking if she wouldn’t mind committing social suicide.) Caroline found a polite way to turn me down, and for a good twenty-four hours my world was a shambles. I was all set to go join a monastery in the mountains, when who should sit next to me in band class? Crush number two: Cathleen Krause, the beauty of the brass section. The Cathleen situation was looking pretty good until one day out of the blue she told me that in order to date her I’d have to join her evangelical church, which congregated for several hours each Sunday in the conference room of a Motel 6. Point being, what seems like catastrophe today will be a funny anecdote next week. What’s more, you’ll learn from your failures, so in the end they were never really failures, but lessons.

One thing at a time. What happens when you work on content selection, differentiation strategies, performance-based task design, and behavior management all at once? Burnout. Burnout is like an STD—you think it only happens to other people, until it happens to you. And besides, multitasking is inefficient. Pick one area of focus (your mentor or administrator can help you choose) and go full-tilt until that area is no longer a dirty word. Then, and only then, move on. I recommend you begin with content selection, since really engaging content is good classroom management, to some extent. And so by really focusing on one skill at a time, that proficiency spills over into other areas. How convenient!

Make time for yourself. Burnout avoidance is a recurring theme here for good reason. We want to keep you around. You’re good people, I can tell. Our students are not benefited by the new-teacher carousel, where half of any given urban kid’s teachers are brand new and learning on the fly (no offense). So take a little time each week to unwind with some fancy beer or hiking or whatever floats your boat. And no, reading Teach Like a Champion in a hot tub does not count.

You’re gonna be great.

–Mr. L

An open letter to the NYC Department of Ed.

“Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.”

- Fletcher, The Outlaw Josey Wales

Photo credit: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images North America

Dear Chancellor Walcott, Mayor Bloomberg, and the underlings who might actually read this:

I work at one of the twenty-four high schools that you’re trying to close. Here are a few reasons why it would be a mistake to follow through.

Your process is a sham. So the closing lists are data-based, are they? How is it, then, that our school is on the list with a three-year history of D, D, C, whereas Murry Bergtraum HS, with its three consecutive D’s, is not? Deputy Chancellor Sternberg claims that the twenty-four schools were identified based on their lack of “. . . capacity to improve dramatically and to improve quickly. . .” How can your list include schools on the upswing, as well as schools that consistently outperform (three consecutive C’s) Bergtraum and others that are somehow under your radar?

If you were honest, you’d admit that your process is based largely on cronyism (Which principals have been loyal to us, and which ones do we want to punish?) and real estate. The intentional decline of community schools makes it easier to squeeze Bloomberg-schools and charters into whichever buildings they want. In two years my 93-year-old school has been “phased down” to make room for two new schools. The newest is a middle school with only a sixth grade and designs on growing by one grade per year. With the building already at capacity, where will this growing school’s classrooms come from? Our school, of course. The writing is on the wall.

We’re already doing better. After breaking our backs all of last year trying to dig ourselves out of a two-D hole, we found out six weeks ago that our efforts were paying off. Our C was the shot in the arm we needed. I can’t describe the pride and camaraderie my colleagues and I felt. Not that a C is the ultimate goal, but given our challenging demographics (percentage of IEP students [re: special ed.] is much higher than the citywide average) and huge budget cuts (almost all extracurriculars and student support programs were lost), it felt like summiting K2. And how does the DOE respond to our less-with-more rally? Death row.

You’d be creating a void with no plan to fill it. I teach at a career and technical high school. Many of our students do not see themselves as college material and choose instead to pursue lucrative, commendable careers in electrical, vision care technology, and so forth. And yet our kids are measured against the same metrics used at so-called peer schools that describe themselves as purely college-prep. Why? If we are differentiating the content and stated purpose of our schools, it is unfair to compare data with zero calibration for those differences.

If you close our school, where will future cohorts of comparable students go? To illustrate: we just launched a culinary arts program, and we are the only place that offers such a program for students in our tier of grades and state test scores. When you look at our true peer schools, we do pretty well. More to the point, this constant closing and opening of schools doesn’t work. Shuffling and redistributing faculty severs professional relationships—the kind of relationships built on trust on familiarity, the kind of relationships that inspire collaboration, instructional alignment and, dare I say, happy teachers.

In short, your decision-making ignores the needs of children. What my kids need is consistency, and teachers who are supported rather than demoralized, and a board of education that looks at context as well as performance.

Sincerely,

Mr. L

Classroom management, as explained by a Prussian philosopher

I am a proud and out philosophy major. Yes, I spent four years and tens of thousands of dollars staring into space asking, “But. . . why?” Imagine my parents’ chagrin when I switched from pre-med(!) to analytic philosophy. Back when I was in undergrad and was therefore constantly being asked what my major was, the follow-up question was typically, “Come on, when are you going to use that?”

Now that I’m four years removed, I can honestly answer, “Constantly.”

Philosophy is less a content area than it is a set of lenses for viewing and scrutinizing things, and scrutiny is paramount in my vocation. Teaching in the public school system is fertile ground for the philosopher–from bureaucratic logical paradoxes to daily moral quandaries, teaching has it all. What’s more, I’m not alone in my esteem for philosophy’s utility in teaching. While reading an assigned text for grad school (Alfie Kohn’s Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community [2006]), I found the following epigram for a chapter titled “Bribes and Threats”:

If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds either of advantage to himself.                   – Immanuel Kant, “Education”

Kant summarizes the failure of pedagogy based on punishments and rewards so perfectly that there’s nothing more I can say on the matter, so I won’t try. I will only add that I wrote my senior thesis on the ethics of him, Kant, and another guy called Aristotle. I wonder how their parents reacted when they chose to major in philosophy.

Kant. Wikipedia Commons. Artist unknown.

The true story of a once-lonesome reader

A recent grad school assignment required a personal literacy narrative, the goal being a sort of mental Venn diagramming of our own versus our students’ interactions with reading and writing. The professor seemed to expect this exercise would reveal just how easy we had it, in contrast to our SpEd kids’ constant struggles and humiliation. For me, the effect was contrary. See below.

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The story of my literacy begins before my first memories, even before words and walking. From the day I was born, my mother would read with me. She’d sit me up in the crook of her arm, place a book across my belly and read aloud, turning the pages with my incapable little hand as we went. She was simulating what she hoped I would later do daily of my own accord. She did this nightly against her in-laws’ vehement protests. “That baby should be sleeping!” they’d shout with good intention. I don’t know who was in the right, or even if this was a true question of right and wrong. I don’t remember any of it, nor can I recall stumbling through my first book. I was four.

Of course, writing came later. I remember trudging through alphabet drills in second grade, trying to make my letters match those running across the banner atop the chalkboard, trying to get the dimensions just right. Adult, non-teacher handwriting remained a mystery for several more years. By the fourth grade, we were asked to write short works—reports and stories. I wrote a report about the mud flipper, an amphibious fish, and a fictitious story about a dream in which I canoed to an island at midnight and then fell down a never-ending pit.

I was an odd kid. We moved around a lot, about once per year, and I had few friends, none of them long-term. But I was good at reading and writing and so I lived in that world. In the literary universe, I fit in. Popular kids went to sleepovers and the skate rink; I hid in my room and read stories. Unlike my classmates, I wore off-brand sneakers and wiped my nose on my sleeve and never got dropped off at school by a mom in a Range Rover. (All of which, in retrospect, enhances the ability to empathize and connect with socially ostracized SpEd kids.)

In middle school, I was proud of myself three times. The first was making first chair trumpet in band class. The second was leading my football team in tackles. The third and most significant: public praise of my writing in English class. I remember every detail of that day. My teacher, Mrs. O’Connor, had assigned an in-class essay. The only guideline was that we had to write about something we appreciated. With a few minutes left in the period, I walked my paper up to the teacher’s desk. As I slid back down into my desk, I heard Mrs. O’Connor say, “You guys want to hear an example of really good writing? I haven’t read this yet, but I know it’s excellent. Listen to what your classmate [insert name] just wrote.” And she read my essay aloud, my classmates every so often nodding their heads in assent—yes, [insert name] writes a good essay. If this event seems minor, consider it within the context of my social invisibility.

College was a place where literacy was valued by students and teachers alike, and I began to feel good about myself as the kid who liked to read and write. It shouldn’t have surprised me that I became an English teacher. It did, though. The years after college were packed with short-lived, zealous pursuits.  Everywhere I went, colleagues valued me most for my skills as an overhaul-editor, as the guy who could take what they’d meant to say or write and say it better, and in fewer words.

Adults sometimes speak of vocations. To me, jobs never seemed preordained, and talk of finding one’s calling struck me as silly and myopic. I was wrong. Teaching English—especially teaching English to students who have always struggled with it—suits me the way gin suits hot weather. It’s easy to get frustrated with the illogical bureaucracy that cuts my checks, but hard to tire of the actual job of teaching content to my students. If I taught any other subject, I might have gotten fed up enough to leave. But the ability to share my oldest love with kids whose lives are severely lacking in the realm of positive academic experiences—this is a daily opportunity to be the creator of Mrs. O’Connor-like memories.

I don’t reach all my students, I don’t knock every lesson out of the park, I don’t pump my fist in the air at the end of each day. In this sense, my idealism regarding teaching is long dead. But on the occasional days when I have a moment to reflect on my decision to become a teacher, I feel pretty good about this job vocation.

Lessons learned in behavior management

“Do not use a cannon to kill a mosquito.”

- Confucius

Less is more. We hear this often. From eye shadow to Ambien, it’s true—too much of most anything will do more harm than good. It’s not surprising that the aphorism applies to punishing students. What is surprising, though, is just how little it takes to go too far.

Like most kids, I was sometimes over-punished and sometimes under-punished, depending on my parents’ mood at the time, the presence or absence of witnesses, and my degree of contrition. And although my punishments lacked perfect consistency, the trend was clear enough to instill discipline. But as a high school teacher, my margin of error is much smaller than a parent’s. I have far less contact time with each kid, and due to the publicity of classroom chastisement, students are peer-motivated to save face (which takes the form of defiance and grudge-holding). This is especially true of students with emotional disturbance, with whom a simple “Sign the late log, please” can elicit suspension-worthy reactions.

Teachers, too, must save face. However we handle disruptive behavior will be observed, analyzed and remembered, and may influence other students’ future behavior. There are three ways to address misbehavior, and only one of them really works.

1) Corporal punishment is out. Even if it were still legal, coercion is no way to run a classroom. It takes a lot of effort to instill and maintain a culture of fear, and all this attention could be better spent building trust, creating more engaging content, or both.[1]

2) Getting flustered, stamping your feet, and yelling—you might as well announce, “I don’t know what I’m doing! Students, the power is yours!” We’ve all had at least one of these teachers. They’re never the good ones, are they?

3) Become a master of Jedi mind tricks. Yes, folks, mental manipulation is where it’s at. Why let L. Ron Hubbard have all the fun? An education professor of mine explained our task better than I ever could:

“Why is teaching the hardest job in the world? ‘Cause you’re a shit-sandwich salesman. You got kids who don’t wanna be there, much less learn and behave. So you basically gotta sell ‘em a shit sandwich, and convince ‘em they like it, so tomorrow they come back for more.”

Sure it’s paternalistic, but when your kids can’t read and don’t want to learn how, a little paternalism is warranted.[2]

Yet even the best strategy for reacting to misbehavior is merely reactive, and the best teachers strive to be proactive. As the adage goes, the best defense is a good offense. What does a good offense look like? Engaging lessons with structured “breaks”: opportunities for peer discussion, physical movement, change of pace. On my best days, I don’t need Jedi mind tricks. A well-handled behavioral disruption is still a disruption. Making each lesson relentlessly engaging—with differentiated activities and extension work for early finishers—smothers the possibility of misbehavior, which is most often a symptom of boredom or frustration.

All this is to say the bulk of behavior management happens before class begins. You may be the Child Whisperer, but show up with a weak lesson and you’d better be ready to do a lot whispering.

 

[1] Bear in mind, I’m discussing what wouldn’t work in my classes. I went to a Virginia military school where corporal punishment was permitted and was generally effective. But that was a different situation in kind. My geometry teacher was notorious for combining pain with public shaming. If your sideburns exceeded the military allowance, he’d rip them out. If you farted in class, you’d have to “assume the position” and get spanked by four metal yardsticks duct-taped together. These tactics would never pass, though, in a room full of emotionally disturbed Brooklyn teens.

[2] Paternalism, as I understand it, means acting as a parent would, i.e. making choices on a child’s behalf rather than leaving decisions wholly up to the child. The premise is that kids, including teens, don’t yet know (or acknowledge) what’s best for them.

Am I a bad person for laughing?

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

We recently finished scoring our kids’ statewide (Regents) exams. Most students made progress; some made us incredibly proud. A select few, though, seldom came to class all year, paid no attention when they did attend, and then hoped for a miracle on test day. Guess how that plan worked out for them.

Below are a few choice lines, all sic, taken from a set of U.S. History exams that I marked. Enjoy.

“for example in 1941, fraklin D roosevelt Asked Congress to declare war on Japan because I think Japan was trading the U.S bad food proodcts I guess.”

I think. . . I guess. Come on, at least try to sell me on your stab in the dark.

“President Harry Truman wanted to drop a atomic bomb on Japan because they bomb Pearl habor so why not bomb them back the way they did the United States.”

Hey, why not?

“George H.W. Bush came to the aid of Kuwait, Hawaii.”

Bet you didn’t know that.

“A couple of dummys from Afghanistan drove a plane into the twin towers”

You know what? Well said.

“Sometimes you’ll hear really racist Jokes and a bunch of Stereotypes, all they have to do is ignore it those people are stupid.”

Yep, they’re just a bunch of dummies.

“What the president did was he sent troops over to Afghanistan Which started a war, Millions of people died it was all very sad.”

Can’t you just feel the empathy?

“torist had hi-jack a plane and Crash in to the twin towers Which was the largest city in the world.”

Little-known fact about the twin towers.

“The two rights are unfair. Blacks can’t go on the white (west) side. Women wanted to vote but it’s unfair that men is better than women.”

And that, dear reader, is the Civil Rights Movement in a nutshell.

Last, my personal favorite. This is the first sentence of a short essay on immigration:

“The specific immigrant group that cam to the united States was the terrorist from Afghanistano”

Afghanistano, known for its mozzarella, marble sculptures and IEDs.

Amusing though they are, these essay responses highlight the cracks in our education system, or perhaps our society as a whole. Sadly, some of our kids slip through the cracks. As educators, there are three possible reactions to this tragedy:

1) It’s our fault. We could have done more.

2) It’s not our fault. There are far greater variables affecting our kids than those we can control.

3) It’s probably not our fault, but we should try to do more anyway.

My guess is that most teachers in high-need settings have reaction number three. It’s frustrating and exhausting trying to inspire kids on the bubble, kids we seldom see in class, kids who are so caught up in their gang or their street cred or their bitterness that the window of influence is nearly shut.

I’m reminded of the Greek myth of Sisyphus. In the afterlife, Sisyphus was given an eternal task: he had to push a huge rock up a steep mountain, only to have it tumble back down as soon as he reached the summit. He’d then walk back down to the foot of the mountain and start all over again. Teaching kids on the bubble feels Sisyphean. Even still, there are isolated triumphs that make the whole ordeal worthwhile. At least for a moment you got your boulder to the top of the mountain. And with this in mind, you start pushing all over again.

The man in the mirror: Personal reflections on a year of teaching special ed.

“I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values.”

- Sidney Poitier

It’s not every day an old lady at the dog park calls me an asshole, but today I was treated to this very appraisal. Allow me to explain. During off-leash hours the park is packed with frenzied, slobbering beasts, plus their dogs, and all these stimuli can bring out the worst in easily excitable canines. Enter my Parson Russell terrier, Clarence. If Clarence were a student, his IEP would read, “Diagnosis: ADHD and Emotional Disturbance.” To say he’s high strung is like saying Joan Rivers cares just a bit about looking young.

Don’t let the cuteness fool you. There’s a storm brewing inside him.

So we’re at the park, and a ten-dog fight breaks out over a tennis ball, which is of course in Clarence’s mouth. Wanting to end the brawl, I reach in and yank my dog out of the fracas by his scruff, and he yelps. I guess this looks like abuse to the eloquent stranger who shouts, “Put him down, ya asshole!” I can’t help but notice that her dog is a calm, uninvolved Labrador. How convenient.

This morning’s episode illustrates a feature of education (and of dog training) that is essential to critical reflection—because every teaching decision is inherently contextual, methods ought to be judged contextually, not absolutely. Shifting my judgments from black-and-white to grayscale has overhauled my pedagogical perspective and allowed for a more nuanced understanding of what “good” teaching looks like. Over the past year, my opinions and my approach have changed most significantly around the following issues.

Fairness is fluid

One reason I like sports so much is that they are built on a foundation of fairness. Unlike in life, in sports the rules are clear and apply to everybody. I have a special affinity for fair play and a special hatred of cheating. When I began teaching, I was obsessed with fairness and was easily upset by anything resembling preferential treatment. Problem is, social interactions in school are not clear cut—there’s no universal rulebook, and not everyone participates voluntarily. Students do not all share the same needs and goals, and teachers honestly don’t hold the same expectations for all.

In fact, the whole enterprise of special education is unfair in the strict sense of the word. It’s a libertarian’s nightmare, really: extra time on tests, modified behavioral expectations, and grossly disproportionate allocation of funds (on related service providers such as speech therapists and counselors, e.g.). But any parent of two or more will tell you it’s impossible and unreasonable to treat every child the same. Individualized treatment does not equate to favoritism, it’s simply responsive and appropriate. And perhaps more to the point, individuals themselves have varying moods and personas, which require observant, calibrated handling. Any one student will have vastly different needs at different times. Fairness does not mean one standard for all, it means providing exactly what each child needs to grow.

I am not immune to the first-year curve

My immediate supervisor is a great listener. She patiently sat through my dozen or so rants on topics ranging from the laziness of our students to the bass-ackwards priorities of the NYC Department of Ed. With the tranquility of a Buddhist monk she endured my tirades, assuring me that they were all part of the first-year process. She even offered me a graphic representation of my frustration:

Like an adolescent I protested that my disillusionment was genuine and therefore couldn’t possibly be explained via some hackneyed, you’re-not-alone brand of pseudo-psychology. Well, I was wrong. Now that it’s late June and I have a little mental breathing room, it is clear that those textbook phases were spot on.

Still, the graph could be a little more specific. I’ve reworded it to more honestly reflect my year:

Original version	Honest version
Anticipation	Reading useless books on pedagogy
Survival	Endless lesson planning
Disillusionment	Too much whiskey
Rejuvenation	Professional development seminars
Reflection	Slightly less whiskey
Anticipation	X-ing days off calendar

Some kids are hopeless

I know, I know. That sounds like something a cynical burnout would say. I assure you I’m not being cynical, nor have I burned out. (You saw my graph, right?) What I mean is that some children are so obstinate in certain areas that the only feasible tactic is to give up on one aspect of instruction and focus on the others. I’m referring specifically to behavior modification, or the instruction of maturity.

When I began teaching, mutual respect, politeness and effort were the only things I truly cared about. To be sure, they still top my list of priorities, and most of my students understand my values and act accordingly. There have been a tenacious few, though—mostly kids with emotional disturbance—who are so pridefully averse to changing their behavior that if I get stuck on their rudeness we’ll never get anywhere. In these rare cases I have had to ignore the fact that I despise the makeup of their character (yes, I feel this strongly about two of my kids) and focus entirely on giving them the content-area instruction that they need to pass their state exams.

This feels like defeat. And in a way, it is. But some people are beyond changing for unpredictable stretches of time. The period could be a year, a decade, a lifetime. Adolescence is generally a period of experimenting with various appealing personas, then deciding which one we prefer, but not all adolescents are interested in this process of self-actualizing. Erik Erikson, the famous developmental psychologist who coined the phrase identity crisis, warns that some emotionally hardened teens do zero experimentation and self-reflection, opting instead for a state of “foreclosure. . . [which is] a commitment to a particular life course without adequately exploring alternatives,” (Nakkula, 2006, p. 15). It’s a waste of time trying to pry open a door that has been sealed shut.

My thinking is that for those students who are totally closed off to self-improvement, I can still add value to their lives by at least helping them get their diploma, so if years later some personal crisis re-opens the door to introspection, they will at least have options that they would not have as high school dropouts. This may be a huge concession, but I’m making lemonade. As Harvard professor of psychology Michael Nakkula explains, “[A]dolescence provides the best last chance to rework some of the prior crises, and thus reset the course for positive subsequent development,” (ibid). While the teenage years may be the ‘best last chance’ for significant change, there’s no telling for certain how any individual’s life will pan out. In some cases, the most I can do is help a kid prepare for the off chance of delayed-onset maturity. For these anomalous students I am not hopeful in the real sense, the sense of expecting things to get better. I don’t give up on them, but I do cut my losses.

Summary

And on that happy note, my self-reflection brings me back to the scene at the park this morning. I began this academic year with the glib presumptuousness of the lady who called me an asshole. The news attacked underperforming teachers, so of course those lousy teachers were to blame. I believed myself to be informed, and I was ready to issue pithy opinions. If only every reporter could teach for a year in a failing school system. If only every dog lover could own a maniacal terrier. Doing what’s best for others isn’t always easy, or pretty—as only those who’ve done the job can attest.

Bibliography

Nakkula, M. and Toshalis, E. (2006). Understanding Youth: Adolescent Development for Educators. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.