I can’t die at my desk unnoticed. Oh well.

Teaching isn’t the easiest or the best paying job, but I have always wanted to teach and am happy that I chose this profession. In addition to the daily joys that it brings, I have found some of my best friends through teaching.  Colleagues, the parents of students and even former students, now all grown up, have become some of the most important people in my life. I had no idea that teaching would fill my life with so many extraordinary people.

And there’s the added bonus that if I were to ever die on the job, one of my two dozen students would undoubtedly notice my corpse before long.

They are observant that way.

Not so for Rebecca Wells, a 51-year-old Department of Internal Services worker who died in her cubicle on Friday, February 16 in Los Angeles County and went unnoticed until the following day.

There may be days when I wish the kids mistook me for dead and just left me alone for a few minutes, but this is taking that desire to an extreme.

 

A few random quandaries

1. How  did oak tag get its name? 2.  Why is it a travesty to chop down a two hundred year old tree, but you can hack down a ten year old tree without batting an eye? Why is an old tree any more precious than a young one?

3. Why is Jesus rarely portrayed as Middle Eastern? At best he appears well-tanned. Like a hippy from Boca Raton.

He was Middle Eastern. Right?

King Phillip was the best we could do?

My wife attended King Phillip Middle school as a child. There are two other schools in the United States that take their name from King Phillip. I continue to be astounded by the use of his name for any school.

King Philip Middle School was named after King Philip, which is the English mispronunciation-bastardization of the Wampanoag tribal chief Metacomet, who led a war against the Puritans from 1675-1676. Proportionate to the colonial and Native American populations at the time, it was one of the bloodiest and costliest wars in the history of North America. More than half of New England's ninety towns were assaulted by Native American warriors, and one-tenth of all Puritans were killed.

Yet for some reason, three schools in America have named themselves in honor of this Native American chief and have used the English version of his name rather than the guy’s actual name while doing so.

This seems stupid enough, but even more so considering there is little historical record in relation to King Philip. He led a Native American tribe, fought Puritan expansion, and died at the hands of another Native American while hiding out in the swamps of Rhode Island.

I guess he could have been a great man, but who knows?

Maybe he was lousy leader. Maybe he was a jerk.

After all, he only ascended to the role of chief after his brother died. It wasn’t like anyone elected the guy to office. The Wampanoag chose their leaders just like the English chose kings.

He also failed to handle the conflict diplomatically and was outmaneuvered by several other Native American tribes which forged alliances with the English in order to undermine Wampanoag power in the region.

Weren’t there more verifiably worthy Native Americans to consider when naming a middle school? Or at least Native Americans with actual Native American names?

And if you are going to use a guy you know little about, why not at least use his actual name instead of some foreign-tongue ruination?

The other two schools using King Phillip's name are in Massachusetts. It is a school district comprised of a middle and a high school which both bear King Philip’s name (as does the district itself).

This is the district’s logo, which may or may not be an accurate representation of the seventeenth century Native American chief.

I’m guessing not.

Why didn’t someone show me before I went to college?

Based upon yearly income, elementary school teacher is the worst paying of all college degrees. While I believe that teachers are underpaid, I am also quick to remind colleagues that teachers work about 185 days a year, whereas most professionals (and perhaps all other professionals) work 240-250 days a year.

If an elementary school teacher earning $33,000 a year (the national average) went from 185 to 250 working days in a year, he or she would probably be earning an average salary in the neighborhood of $45,000.

Still not enough considering the importance of the job and level of ongoing education required (it costs more for a teacher to become licensed in the state of Connecticut than it does an attorney), but enough to get the elementary teaching profession out of the top five worst paying of all college degrees and into the top paying jobs without a college degree.

Uhg.

I love teaching and cannot imagine doing anything else, but when I see these income statistics and continue to write checks for education loans that I am still paying as a result of the Master’s degree that was required in order to keep teaching, I have to wonder what the hell I was thinking.

Assigned seating sucks

I learned an important lesson last week. I arrived early to a workshop in order to sit at the table of my choice. This was the second day of training, and so I was familiar with the classroom layout from the previous day’s training. I knew that I would be spending the next seven hours in this classroom, and I wanted to position myself in a location where I could be most effective.

I chose a table in the rear corner of the room. This was a position that afforded me a view of the entire room as well as both exits. This was similar to the position that I take in every room whenever possible, whether it be a conference room, a library reading room, a classroom, a faculty lunch room or a restaurant. As a sufferer of post traumatic stress disorder, I am most comfortable when I can see everyone in the room and have no one sitting behind me. I also like to keep all entrances and exits within my field of vision at all times.

When I am unable to establish this position in the room, I am uncomfortable. I feel unsafe. My focus and attention suffers.

After taking a seat in a preferred position, the instructor announced that she was going to randomly shift our positions in the room. As a result, I ended up in the worst seat possible in terms of my needs. I was placed in the front center of the room, with my back to a door and half of the people in the room.

I could not have been placed in a worse spot.

The workshop was designed to provide us with teaching strategies for specific types of learners, and early on during the first day of training, the instructor discussed the process of reducing the affective filter for students in order to improve learning. The affective filter is comprised of the barriers that interfere or prevent learning from taking place. A lack of motivation, inappropriate behaviors, an unwillingness to participate, and the undervaluing of education are all factors that can raise the affective filter in a student.

Another factor, it turns out, is a utter disregard for the seating preferences of adults. I purposely arrived early to the training in order to ensure myself a spot where I could be most effective, and then, for no discernible reason, the instructor randomly assigned me a new location in the room, leading to a rapid increase in my affective filter.

I was angry. I was annoyed. I was nervous. I was unable to muster maximum focus and effort to the task at hand.

All of that makes for one hell of an affective filter.

Why did the instructor do this?

I’m not sure.

Perhaps she believed that breaking up the previous day’s groups would reduce ancillary chatter and increase attentiveness. Except the previous day’s training had been nearly free of any side conversations, so if this was the justification for her decision, it was not based upon any evidence. In truth, she was an outstanding instructor who effectively established group norms during the first fifteen minutes of the workshop, thus eliminating most of the distracting and off-task behaviors.

In short, we were quite attentive on the first day of training.

Also, if there was ancillary chatter or a lack of focus amongst our group, the solution would not be to change our seating. This is what ineffective teachers do to solve behavioral problems. I frequently explain to my student teachers that misbehavior and inattentiveness is not a function of geography. If the kids aren’t listening, you are doing something wrong. So even if we had been a bad audience during the previous day, moving our positions in the room would not have corrected the problem.

Later in the day, we were engaged in activities that required four or five people per table, but asking participants to sit in groups of four or five while honoring their choice of seat in the room could have easily been done.

And before you start wondering if this need for specific seating is restricted solely to PTSD sufferers, two other participants expressed displeasure in their seating assignment to me during the day. One woman was placed at a table near the windows and complained that she was cold all day.

“I would’ve sat on the other side of the room, away from the windows, if I had been given a choice.”

Another told me that she was envious of my seat in the front of the classroom because when she is sitting in the back of a classroom, she tends to “zone out.”  She needs to be close to the action to maintain focus.

Even in my fifth grade classroom, students have choice of seating. While I determine their table assignment on a month-to-month basis, students can choose from any of the eight desks that comprise the table. They negotiate, collaborate, compromise, and occasionally cut deals in order to obtain the spot that makes them them happiest.

Accommodating personal preferences is simply the right thing to do. My philosophy has always been to give students as much choice and as much freedom as possible, and I try to remove myself from the decision-making process in the classroom whenever I can.

The less I say and the less I do, the more my students learn.

A lesson this otherwise effective instructor could do well to learn.

iCarly trumps Robert Frost and Val Kilmer

I am reading Shakespeare’s Richard II to my students. On Friday we came across the phrase “rue the day” in the text. I was prepared to tell them all about Frost’s poem Dust of Snow:

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

I also planned on briefly reviewing the excellent “rue the day” reference from the 1985 film Real Genius.

But when I asked if anyone knew what the phrase “rue the day” might mean, almost every hand in the class went up.

Had they studied Frost in fourth grade?

Did they recently view a Val Kilmer film retrospective at the local college theater?

No. They had all learned the phrase from something called iCarly, which I initially thought was a video game. Apparently an episode of the program featured the phrase rather prominently.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

Facebook Fail

A former colleague passed away this week. We worked together for about six years, and while we never became close friends, he was the first teacher to greet me as I nervously made my way into the school on a humid August afternoon in 1999 to begin setting up my classroom.

He walked me around the building that day, giving me the lay of the land and offering me materials that he was no longer using. The two of us rarely saw eye-to-eye during our teaching days, but he was always as kind and supportive to me as he was on that first day that we met.

In a final stroke of irony, Facebook featured his name and photo this evening in the People You May Know section of my sidebar, suggesting that he and I may want to become Facebook friends. It was the first time that I can ever remember seeing his name and image on my Facebook wall, and Facebook chose today to do so.

In case you were concerned, there is a process by which a deceased person’s Facebook account can be memorialized, so that these things do not happen, and I’m hoping that my former colleague has someone in his life who knows how to do this.

I’m not sure why this is the case, but the image of him floating in his kayak in a North Carolina river is haunting to me.

Perhaps it serves as an unnecessary and unwanted reminder of how tragically short a person’s retirement can be.

And it’s a reminder of death, of course, which is not a subject that I handle with great aplomb.

Catastrophic yawn

Other than his invitation to students to rat out the perpetrator (anonymously, no less, which is always the most cowardly and despicable means of conveying a message), I kind of think this professor handled the situation perfectly. It wouldn’t be the right approach for fifth graders, of course, but I don’t think it’s too far off, either.

Thoughts?

Who yawned?

A collection of ineffective and legitimately insane and possible criminal teachers

At a book appearance near my hometown, several of my high school friends graciously gathered to listen to me speak. After the event, half a dozen of us hung around the library, sharing stories from our days in school together. Conversation turned to our former teachers, and after a few minutes, someone correctly pointed out that our collective childhood was littered with inappropriate, strange and oddball educators who, if working in education today, wouldn’t last ten minutes.

Some of the the examples included:

The teacher who pulled one of our classmates out of the room by her hair.

The teacher who was caught by one of my classmates making out with a substitute teacher in the science lab.

The teacher who required students to only raise their dominant hand.

The seeming abundance of high school teachers who ended up marrying their former students.

The teacher who married a former student and then lost his job after an indiscretion with another former student.

The teacher (who I have written about before) who assigned me the nickname The Big Dickus and my brother The Little Dickus, and who handed out detentions like he was doling out candy and zeros as test grades for bad behavior.

The teacher who would watch us eat lunch with an unlit cigarette hanging from her mouth.

The teacher who we made cry in fourth grade.  And the other teacher who we made cry in fourth grade.

The teacher who refused to teach my fourth grade class when we returned to elementary school (that was quite a year for us).

The teacher who told me that she had given me a D- on my report card because she didn’t like me.

These are just some of the less-than-savory, less-than-skilled educators who litter my educational landscape. I know I’m forgetting others, and perhaps my high school friends can add to the list for me.

But I wonder:

Were these teachers reflective of the time period that I attended school (1976-1989) or was my hometown a gathering point for lunatics and unskilled professionals?

Testicular cancer talk

Sometimes former students and I maintain friendships long after their days in my classroom have ended. These students and I tend to share similar personalities and interests, and as they get older, it’s easy to understand why they continue to visit me in my classroom long after they have left elementary school. For a few former students, the teacher-student relationship has slowly developed into a genuine friendship. As I have become close with their parents (and now call some of them my closest of friends), and as they have headed off to college and bigger and better things, I have begun to view these young people as friends, even if they continue to call me Mr. Dicks.

One of my former students, now in college, is my daughter’s primary babysitter and an all-around friend of our family. On Saturday, while I was working, she and my wife spent the afternoon together, playing with Clara.

Two other students (a brother and sister combination) are our primary dog sitter, and still another is our backup dog sitter. We have invited former students and their families to our home for Christmas and Thanksgiving and Clara’s first birthday, and we have been invited to their homes for similar reasons. I count myself lucky to have these young people in my life.

Yesterday two such former students, now all grown up and attending college, came to visit me at the end of the school day. We chatted for about fifteen minutes before I headed off to a meeting, but in that time, it became apparent why these students and I have become such good friends.

The first girl’s hair is quite long. In the midst of our conversation, I asked if she planned on cutting it soon and perhaps give the hair to an organization like Locks for Love. She replied, “Of course not. I’m saving it for when I get cancer. In that case, my wig will match my natural hair color.”

While a fellow teacher was slightly horrified at the remark, I found it quite clever.

We then began chatting about cellphones, and somehow this led to a discussion on how radar detectors once emitted so much radiation that police officers in the 1970’’s were contracting cancer at alarming rates. “It’s the same with cellphones,” the other girl added. “So keep your cellphone out of your pocket or you’ll get testicular cancer.”

Having the former student mention my testicles was odd enough, but as she did, she pointed to my groin as well.

While I found the moment refreshingly innocent and amusing and a clear indication of the friendship I share with these girls, teachers never want students, all grown up or otherwise, pointing to their testicles.

A lot can happen in twelve years…

Tonight I learned that a student from my very first class, a former second grader who I taught twelve years ago, is modeling a line of clothing that was designed and manufactured by my friend and his partner.

That is a damn small world.

I can’t get over it.  I’m sitting here, staring at photos of a woman wearing clothing designed by my friend, and I can remember teaching this woman how to add with regrouping like it was yesterday. 

And now I am feeling a little bit old. 

My little second grader is now modeling high-end fashion?

I still can’t believe it.

My thought for the day

After twelve years of teaching, I have learned a great deal. I am in the process of generating a top-10 list of the most important lessons that I have learned, though it seems to be expanding into a book. But here is one of those universal truths that I have recently become fixated upon that I thought I should share:

So much of what a teacher should be doing, and yet is so often underscored and forgotten completely, is motivating students to succeed.

All else should be secondary.

If a teacher does not connect to his students, establish meaningful relationships with families and find a way to excite that student to learn and achieve, all is lost.

Teachers who have difficulty motivating students are afraid to be honest with students and their parents, ignore the important role that fun and play should have in learning and erect unnecessarily professional barriers between themselves and their students and families.

All of the success that I have experienced in my twelve years of teaching, all of those stories of remarkable student turnarounds and enormous academic gains, have had nothing to do with my skill or expertise as an educator. It had nothing to do with books or technology or differentiated instruction.

It has all come down to motivating my students by any and all means possible. By clawing and scraping and cheering and badgering and pushing and pulling until a student has found the desire to succeed.

When a child wants to learn, the battle has been won.

Embodiment of their teacher

As my school year begins, so does the process of preparing for another year of Shakespeare. The preparation for the yearly production is remarkably hard work for me and the students, and throughout much of the process, I hate myself for even attempting such a difficult endeavor. But when my students perform the play for the parents, and children are speaking, shouting, and emoting the words of Shakespeare, I am reminded about how much I love the end result and the learning that has taken place throughout the year. My students will leave my class at the end of this academic year with background in many of the Shakespearean classics, as well as a understanding Shakespeare’s life and a history of the theater. They will be able to summarize the plot, explain the themes and compare and contrast the motifs in each of the Shakespearean plays that we study, and I will undoubtedly be proud of their accomplishments.

Next summer, I may write a book about my years of teaching Shakespeare to the kids. I have so many fun, inspirational, and interesting stories to share and could easily fill a couple hundred pages with them.

During the casting process for each play, I ask my students to write letters requesting the part that they want most, and I have been saving these letters for more than a decade.  As I prepare for the coming school year, I took a moment to look back upon previous years and dug up some of those old letters.

Since these letters are typically written after more than six months in the school year, students begin to understand what kind of appeals might work and might not with me. Also, some of my students begin to exhibit some of my more prominent traits, and this is often evident in their letters.

Here’s a small sampling from some of those letters from the past:

BRUTAL HONESTY: Even though I don’t want to, I will work every day to try to memorize the lines so I will never mess up in the middle of the play. I don’t plan on looking stupid.

DIABOLICAL INQUISITIVENESS: I don’t really want to be the Earl of Gloucester, but I’m curious about how you plan to gouge his eyes out on stage. That will be very interesting.

POLITICALLY SAVY: P.S. You are great and powerful. P.P.S. Will the P.S. help?

SELF-AWARENESS AND AN UNABASHED SELF PROMOTION: As you know, I have a quick flash of anger. Also, I have the ability to insult and ignore people. All of these traits that I have make me a good actress.

INTIMIDATION: I don’t know how to end a letter. So just remember that I don’t mind a medium sized part but you will pay if you give me a small part.

INTELLIGENCE: By the way, you are tied for my favorite teacher ever. But you have a chance to be first on the list. Maybe.

Clever kids, huh?

Give kids a reason to write

I was on an escalator in the MOMA, and I heard a mother ask her son, “What was your favorite exhibit?” The boy hemmed and hawed and ultimately failed to answer the question.

I wanted to explain to the mother that a better question would have been, “What exhibit did you hate the most?”

This would have most certainly generated a response.

A fundamental truth about human beings, and especially about kids, is that they are more likely to remember the things that they despise rather than the things that they love. I can’t remember a single gift that my grandparents ever gave me save the socks and underwear that I received on Christmas.

It’s just more fun to complain.

And while the mom on the escalator might have preferred to know that her son loved the Mattisse exhibit the most rather than listening to him gripe about the creepy photography, getting him to gripe and complain about the worst exhibit would have been a more effective way of getting him to talk about his visit, and ultimately, he might have gotten around to talking about his favorite as well.

The same holds true in writing.

One of the most common essay topics in the history of mediocre writing instruction asks students to write about their favorite moment from summer vacation.

I find that I get a much more enthusiastic and interesting response if I give the kids the choice to write about their most miserable moment of summer vacation instead. More than half of the class typically chooses this version of the topic, and the responses are often humorous, detailed and utterly engrossing. Most important, the kids appreciate the choice and are more engaged.

Everyone is a critic, so why not embrace this tendency and get kids excited about writing.

It’s why kids took the time to write hate mail to author Neil deGrasse Tyson regarding his mention of Pluto’s recent loss of planetary stature in his book.

People write most enthusiastically when they are angry.

You’ve probably noticed this about me from time to time.

No place like home

As summer vacation draws to a close and my school year begins, I can’t help but think that I am returning home after a summer abroad. After a dozen years of teaching, my school has begun to feel a little like home. It has become a fixture of my life, and during my years spent teaching, I have worked among people who have become some of my closest and dearest friends. I have taught children who return to my classroom on a weekly basis to apprise their former teacher about their adventures in middle and high school. Some of these students have become legitimate friends. I play basketball with them, counsel them on difficulties that they are experiencing and share in their accomplishments and joy. As my first class of students enter college, I find some of them now babysitting my daughter and attending important family events.

I have also developed friendships with the parents of some of my students, and these friends have become some of the most important people in my life.  I count many of them as my best friends, and one is even my daughter’s godmother.

And recently, I came to realize that some of the most important events of my life have taken place inside the walls to my school.

On September 11, 2001, I watched the second plane strike the World Trade Center and the first tower fall on a television in my principal’s office. Immediately thereafter, I retrieved my students from music class and went on with my day without telling them that anything had happened, giving them a few more precious hours of normalcy in a world that had suddenly changed.

In the fall of 2002, I met my future wife in our first staff meeting of the year.  Ironically, our first real conversation would take place a few weeks later at a YMCA camp as we hiked around the lake with students. That discussion centered on the plans for her upcoming wedding, an engagement that she would later break off.

In the fall of 2004, I revealed plans to ask Elysha to marry me to a colleague and friend in our Curriculum Specialist’s office. A month later, while Elysha was trapped in an after-school meeting, a committee of teachers and friends helped me choose Elysha’s engagement ring.

In the spring of 2005, I received a call from the veterinarian before school informing me that my dog required life threatening spinal surgery. I went on to teach for the rest of the day while Kaleigh was in surgery, waiting to hear if she was alive or dead.

In February of 2007, I was sitting at the desk in the principal’s office when my aunt told me over the phone that my mother was dead. I spent a few moments alone before returning to class to finish the day with my kids.

Early in 2008 I was sitting at the desk in my classroom when a call came in from the geneticist, informing me that I was a carrier of the muscular dystrophy gene, and that I was almost certain to contract the same disease that killed my mother.

That same year, I was sitting at the same desk when I received the call from my agent informing me that Doubleday had made a preemptive offer on the book. I spent a moment collecting myself before finding Elysha alone in the hall and informing her of the news. She collapsed to the floor in tears, sparking great concern throughout the faculty that something terrible had happened. I was standing by the library after the school day had ended when negotiations over the book had finished and the call came in with the final purchase price.

With experiences like these, and so many more, is it any surprise that a school can begin to feel like a home?

More importantly, does this happen to everyone at the workplace, or is there something different about working in a school?

Killer

A former student turned adult (Yikes!) reminded me of this story from years past. 

I don’t know how I ever forgot it.

We were reading an article about ants. Included in this story was a description of the insect, including the color of their blood.

“Green?” I asked, wondering if the author of the piece was correct.

“It’s true,” one of my students replied. “When I was little, I was a professional ant squisher. I saw a lot of green blood in my time.”

Clever brats-turned-friends

I’ve reach the point in my teaching career when some of my first students are now becoming young adults. As such, many of them are now becoming people who I am proud to call my friends. I play golf and basketball with former students. I discuss writing and books with them. They attend my readings and signings. I pay them to babysit my daughter.

Just last week I engaged in a challenging, intellectual and reflective conversation with a former student about religion and parenting.

Last year, when my fifth graders performed Julius Caesar for the first time in ten years, five of the students from my first class, former second graders who were now seniors in high school, surprised me by attending our opening night performance and telling stories of the time when they had filled the rolls of Caesar, Brutus and Antony for me.

They remembered far more about that first year of teaching than I could ever hope to recall.

Some of my students leave elementary school and are never seen or heard from again, but the majority of them eventually return, seeking advice, sharing stories, searching for support, hoping for a quick game of hoops and ultimately growing up and becoming my friends.

It’s an extraordinary and unexpected blessing that I deeply cherish.

And these students-turned-friends often remind me of some of my more amusing teaching moments that I have long-since forgotten.

A former student-turned babysitter recently reminded me of a time when she was in my third grade class. She had asked to read a poem that she loved to the class, and though I had agreed to her request, I forgot about it all day until it was too late. Feeling awful for failing to validate her enthusiasm over poetry, I promised to remember to read the poem the very next morning.

The following day I found the poetry book on my desk with a note inside that read:

Read this to the class, Mr. Evil, or else.

Below the message was a hand-drawn picture of a bee with venom dripping from its stinger and a speech bubble emanating from its mouth that read:

I know your weakness. Ha! Ha! Ha!

I’m allergic to bees.

These are the kinds of moments that I never want to forget.

But the most amusing note that I ever received from a student was found affixed to my shirt at the end of the school day. It read:

For Sale

One very used teacher Needs a lot work Has plenty of ego Must have a stern owner Not nice! $1 or best offer

This makes a Kick Me! sign look like a joke.

Teachers and novelists on Facebook

The West Hartford, Connecticut School district is considering a new policy that would allow administrators to discipline teachers if they post photographs on websites like Facebook that reflect poorly on their in-school work. “The policy would be aimed specifically at photos on Facebook that depict drunken behavior that could reflect poorly on the classroom,” according the the report.

While I am not entirely against this policy, knowing full well that there are instances in which a careful balance between First Amendment rights and occupational responsibilities must be achieved, this seems like a policy that would be fraught with possible inconsistencies and almost impossible to enforce.

In terms of enforcement, the majority of Facebook users keep their information private, meaning that only their friends have access to photographs, status updates, and other data posted online. If a teacher posts photographs of excessive alcohol use from a bachelor party, and those photos can only be accessed by his friends, is this teacher in violation of the policy?  And if so, why, since he has limited their distribution in order to ensure that students cannot gain access to them?

More importantly, how would the school district ever know about these images since administrators would presumably have no access to the photographs either.

Also, what happens if a teacher is tagged in a photograph by a third party?  For example, a teacher vacations in Bermuda with her family, and while there, her sister takes a photograph of the teacher drinking excessively one evening at a bar. The sister then posts the photographs on her Facebook page and tags her sister, the teacher, allowing users to search on her name and locate the photograph on Facebook.

Is this teacher culpable for photographs posted by others?

Does the policy limit what a teacher can post online or what anyone can post online about the teacher?

Thankfully, I do not drink, so there are no photographs of me engaged in drunken behavior of any kind. Go to my Facebook page and you’ll find photographs of Clara and Elysha and little more. However, it seems as if 90% of all photographs posted to Facebook are taken inside bars and are chock full of depictions of drunken behavior. As a result, this could be a problem for many teachers who enjoy a perfectly legal night out at the local saloon from time to time and (for reasons I have never understood) make it a point of documenting the evening with photographic evidence.

Then there’s the issue of subjectivity when applying this policy to each individual. Who gets to decide what is a depiction of drunken behavior and what is ordinary social drinking? What if a teacher posts a photograph of herself drinking champagne at her wedding among her many other wedding photos? Would this be considered a depiction of drunken behavior?

What if a teacher posts a photograph from an evening at Fenway Park, and he has a beer in his hand. Does this depict drunken behavior? Even if the teacher eventually drinks ten beers and is thrown out of the park in the seventh inning, would a single photograph of a single beer be enough to depict drunken behavior?

In fact, how could any single image ever depict drunken behavior?  Assuming that a person cannot be depicted drinking more than one alcoholic beverage at a time, how could any image truly depict drunken behavior?  Unless the Facebook page contains a series of photographs from the night depicting alcohol consumption, or unless the teacher is wearing a lampshade, hanging from a chandelier, and drooling from the corners of his mouth, what type of photograph would ever provide definitive evidence of drunken behavior?

And what happens when this policy begins creeping into other areas, which is my primary concern. While I normally dismiss the slippery slope argument as illogical nonsense, what happens when the standards applied to Facebook are also applied to the author who publishes novels containing content not entirely appropriate for children?

Is a status update laced with profanity or sexually explicit references any different than a novel using the same kind of language?

Once again, I thankfully avoid all profanity when writing online, whether I’m writing on Facebook, Twitter or my blog. I do this because I am not terribly enamored with profanity and use it sparingly in my own life (though considerably more frequently on the golf course). I find it crude, simplistic and lazy. It certainly has a purpose in life (the use of profanity has actually been shown to reduce pain), but not in my everyday speech.

Some of my characters, however, do not feel the same way. They swear, they drink excessively and they have sex. As a novelist, will my subject matter and vocabulary be limited by my teaching career?

Probably not.

If Updike or Roth were teachers, would their school districts have prevented them from using profanity in their novels?

Wally Lamb is a high school English teacher in Connecticut, and his novels include sex and profanity. Did his school district attempt to censor him?

Of course not.

But when policies like this proposed Facebook policy are put into place, I worry that it might be just the first step on the road to greater censorship.

I understand a school district’s desire to ensure that its teachers are acting as role models for their students. I agree that photographs depicting excessive drinking and other questionable activities do not belong on a public Facebook page. But if these photographs are made private or the photographs are made public by the third party, then I believe that the school district has no role in disciplinary action.

After all, this proposed policy seeks to curb online behavior. Not overall behavior. If a teacher wants to drink excessively on a weekend camping trip or attend a bachelor party in a strip club (another activity that I have thankfully never engaged in), the school district should have no control over these choices. Teachers are certainly role models, but in their private lives, they are also human.

As long as teachers keep those excessively private moments in their lives private, all will be well.

But I worry about how far the heavy hand of censorship may someday extend. I love my job as a teacher and I love my career as a writer, and in my mind, never the twain shall meet.

But could there come a day when a school district decides that the book a teacher has written, the sculpture that she has sculpted, the song that he has recorded, or the painting that she has painted is just as inappropriate as a Facebook photograph or status update?

I certainly hope not.

Bittersweet summer vacation

One of my students told me that in an effort to try something new, she drank a glass of milk followed by half a glass of chocolate syrup.  “Then I jumped up and down to mix it all in my belly to make chocolate milk.”

Then she paused for a moment, smiled, and said, “It was awful.  I almost threw up.”

Today was the last day of school, and though I’m looking forward to a summer vacation filled by family time, golf, a book release, and the writing of my fourth novel, I’ll miss the daily joy that my students bring me.

Three biggest mistakes that parents make

In speaking with a friend about her son today, she asked: Based upon your teaching, what are the three biggest mistakes that you see parents make.

I answered without hesitation:

1.Telling a son or daughter that “it’s okay to defend yourself if someone has hit you first.” I inform my students to defend themselves with their feet by running away as fast as possible. Not only could that next punch change a person's life forever, but you never know what a person might have in his or her pocket. As a kid, I ran into bullies with knives on two separate occasions, and both times, I found myself wishing that I had run from the altercation rather than escalating it by punching back. Reacting to a punch or a slap with one of your own can result in finding yourself on the losing end of something a lot more dangerous than a balled-up fist.

2. Involving oneself in disciplinary proceedings at school by demanding specific punishments for students who have wronged your child. This happens when a parent insists that a student be suspended or expelled for transgressions against their own child. While I don’t think there is anything wrong with parents expressing concern for the safety and well-being of their child, presuming that they have any roll in metering out specific punishments is a mistake. While it’s perfectly acceptable to demand that action be taken to ensure the safety and happiness of your child (and to be mad as hell while doing so), parents must trust teachers and administrators to do what is right when it comes to handling the specifics. Teachers and principals are unbiased professionals who are invested in the good of all parties involved, and therefore they should be trusted to do what is best. Attempting to involve oneself in the specifics of disciplinary proceedings can cause even more problems between the families and students involved.

3. Failing to make a child’s life difficult when he or she fails to meet basic academic requirements. Several years ago a former student came to visit me. She was an extremely intelligent young lady who had performed at a high level in elementary school but was now slipping in middle school.  After showing me her brand new phone and telling me about the weekend that she had planned, which included a trip to Six Flags with friends and two sleep-overs, she handed me her progress report.

One B, one C, and four Ds.

“Do your parents know about this?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I got it two weeks ago. They’re mad.”

Apparently not mad enough. They had just purchased her a new phone and were allowing her to enjoy a weekend of fun with her friends.

I asked the student why she was performing so poorly, and she admitted that her friends and her new boyfriend were distracting her from her learning.

As a good friend of mine likes to say, “You can pay now or you can pay later.”  As hard as it may be to discipline your child, failing to make your child’s life miserable when he or she fails academically will only cause greater problems in the future. Having raised a teenage step-daughter, I know how challenging those years can be, and I know how difficult it can be to constantly punish a child who is failing to meet expectations. But if you don’t strike while the iron is hot, you’ll find yourself with a seventeen-year old who lacks the study skills, work ethic and grades to realize success after high school.

That former student, for the record, is doing fine today. She managed to pull her academic career together during her sophomore year in high school and will be finishing college next year. But she was lucky. She realized the importance of academics before it was too late, and her exceptional intelligence allowed her to make up for lost ground.

Not many kids are blessed with those levels of wisdom and intelligence at such an early age. For most kids, parents must fill those gaps with support and discipline.

When they don't, both parent and child will inevitably be paying later.