The difference between playing school and teaching school

Budo, from Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, is credited as saying that there are two types of teachers:

Teachers who play school and teachers who teach school.

In truth, he stole that one from me.

But he’s right.

I’m often asked to expound upon this line from the book, which is one of the most quoted from the book.

For many educators, this sentiment seems to have resonated quite a bit.

Essentially, it’s the difference between the teacher who focuses on the classroom versus the teacher who focuses on the student. It’s the difference between the teacher who prioritizes the preparing of materials and lessons versus the teacher who prioritizes the building of honest, genuine, long-lasting relationships with students and families.

As a student, I could spot these two kinds of teachers from a mile away.

You probably could, too. 

Here’s a couple good rules of thumb:

If your teaching methods closely resemble the teaching methods from your childhood, you are probably playing school.

If you speak to your students in a way that is fundamentally different from the way you speak to friends and family, in either tone and affect, you are probably playing school.

Teachers: Stop commenting, positively or negatively, on your student’s physical appearance. It’s only hurting them.

As an elementary school teacher, I have made it my policy for more than a decade to avoid commenting on a student’s physical appearance. A student’s appearance should be the last thing of concern to a teacher, but more importantly, these comments, even when positive, can be damaging and hurtful to kids.

This policy has been scoffed at by many of my friends and colleagues. I have been laughed at and criticized for my position. Told that I am taking things too far. Becoming too politically correct.

Yet I have articulated this position to every class of students over the past ten years, and I have never had a single student scoff or laugh or even question my policy. Every single student has appreciated and supported my position. Some of have tried to adopt it as well. 

It’s only adults who think I’m dumb.

Up until this point, I haven’t cared. I know I’m right. I know I’m doing right by my students. I’m accustomed to suffering fools gladly.

Then I watched Meaghan Ramsey’s TED Talk “Why thinking you’re ugly is bad for you.”

It turns out that Ramsey would agree with me. She would support my position. Endorse it, even.

In her own words:

“Why can’t we compliment people based upon their effort and actions and not their appearance?”

After listening to Meaghan Ramsey’s talk and learning more about the incredible struggles that young people face when it comes to physical appearance and body image, I decided that it’s no longer good enough to simply ignore my detractors. I need to change their minds. Convince them otherwise. Make them see the light. 

I want my policy of refraining from commenting on a student’s physical appearance to become a policy that all teachers adopt. I want this to be a policy that educators embrace and champion.  

If you are a teacher, I ask you to consider adopting this policy for yourself. Watch Ramsey’s TED Talk. Read my original post on the issue, which outlines my rationale. Ask yourself if there is any reason in the world to compliment the pretty dress or the new haircut in your classroom today. Of all the finite minutes that we have to spend with our students, do you want to use even a tiny fraction of that time talking about wardrobe choices and hairstyles?

Is that the culture you want in your classroom?   

If you agree with me, I ask you to do more than simply adopt the policy yourself. I ask that you become a champion for this policy as well.

• Talk to your colleagues.
• Forward them this blog post.
• Share this blog post via your social media channels.
• Pass along Meaghan Ramsey’s TED Talk.
• Find like minded people who will support you, and when they cannot be found, convince them to be like minded.

Even better, talk to your students. They are likely to be more supportive of this policy than many of the adults with whom you work. Enlist the support of the kids. Turn them into the spokespeople for this issue.

If students rise up and demand that teachers stop commenting on their physical appearance, both positive or otherwise, things would change overnight.

I plan on doing my part as well. I have already reached out to several TED conferences, asking if I can speak on this issue. If you know of someone hosting a conference let me know.

Whenever I am standing in front of a group of teachers (which happens more often than you would think), I will speak about my policy, tangentially if necessary, and ask them to adopt it for themselves.

I’ll look for outlets with larger audiences who will publish my thoughts on this issue. Magazines. Journals. Online resources.

I will seek to change minds and convince teachers that this is the right thing to do.

And it’s not easy. When I first adopted this policy for myself, it took months to train myself to refrain from commenting on physical appearance, and I was never one to mention physical appearance to begin with. I had to reframe my thinking and construct strategies to avoid situations where complimenting a student’s physical appearance almost seemed necessary.

When a student walks into my classroom and asks if I like her new haircut, I had to learn to say, “I didn’t notice your hair at all, but I loved the way you didn’t give up when we were solving those problems in math yesterday. Persistence is going to get you far in life.”

That’s a hard transition to make. It feels incredibly awkward at first. It’s still a little awkward. Explaining my rationale to my students helped, but it was still a long road to where I am today.

Get on the road now. Don’t delay. And spread the word.

It’s the right thing to do. Don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.

How I establish the rules of my classroom

A teacher recently asked me if my students and I collaborate on the rules of my classroom at the beginning of the year.

Actually, the teacher used the word “norms” instead of rules, because norms is quite the buzzword these days. One of these words that filters into education for a while, only to be replaced at some point by the next big thing.

My students and I do not collaborate on the rules of the classroom. The notion of teachers and students collaborating on rules is a popular one. Some teachers spend days establishing the rules (or norms) of their classroom through a collaborative process with their students. Such a process reportedly produces a greater level of ownership and buy-in from students.

I don’t do this.

Unless students are allowed to establish rules such as “Homework is optional” and “Candy will be made available upon request,” the rules that these classes decide upon always look conspicuously like the rules in every other classroom in every school in America.

My system is simple:

I establish the rules of the classroom. Then I encourage students to find ways to dodge, circumvent, or alter these rules without getting caught and punished.

It’s much more fun this way.

My annual plea to the girls in my fifth grade class: Maintain your advantage over the boys. Rule the world.

On Friday, Hillary Clinton  pledged to work to get all the female Democratic candidates on the ballot elected in November.

“I can’t think of a better way to make the House work again than electing every woman on the ballot,” Clinton told the Democratic Women’s Leadership Forum. “There are ten women running for the Senate, six women running for governor and I wish I could vote for all of them.”

I’d like to take it one step further:

I would be willing to replace every male member of Congress with a female lawmaker.

With apologies to my own sex, I have often felt that our country would be better positioned for the future if it were run by women. 

Frankly, it’s shocking that women aren’t in charge already. As a fifth grade teacher, I bear witness to the striking differences between boys and girls at the ages of ten and eleven. It’s well known that girls mature faster than boys, and nowhere is this disparity more evident than in fifth grade.

Every year, I have girls in my class who could already be employed as effective office managers. A few could probably run small companies with the right advisors.

At the same time, I have boys in my class who can’t get food from their plate to their mouth without some disaster occurring in between. I have boys who would scrape sticks in dirt all day if given the chance.  

How these boys ever manage to span this intellectual chasm and in many cases overtake the girls is beyond me. I can only assume that somewhere in middle school or high school, girls turn on one another, stunting their sex’s overall progress, while boys continue to follow a more cooperative, live-and-let-live approach.

Whatever the cause, I gather the girls in my class every spring and implore them to band together and continue their dominance as they move forward to middle school. I tell them with all sincerity that the world would be a better place if it were run by women, and that it’s up to their generation to make this happen.

“Don’t be mean to one another,” I tell them. “Stick together. Support one another. And by all means, don’t fight over boys. We’re not worth it.”

My dream is to send a generation of girls forward who maintain their advantage of boys and eventually take over the world.

Perhaps I’m wrong.  Maybe the world wouldn’t be any better if it were run by women. But after more than two centuries of male domination in the halls of Congress and the boardrooms of corporate America, I’m willing to give the ladies a turn and see what they can do.

It couldn’t be any worse than what my sex has accomplished so far.

I have a simple, inexpensive, highly effective means of improving learning for all students: Make things fun.

The makers of the dancing traffic light get it. It works because it is fun, and fun always increases attention, engagement, effort, and performance.

Fun. It’s a word that is tragically absent from teaching today.

Of all the strategies that teachers could do to be more effective,  making the school day more fun for their students would yield the greatest results, both in terms of effort and performance.

I am writing a book on the subject.

One example:

I give a spelling test every Friday to my students. I read the word, use it in a sentence, and repeat the word. It’s a process done in thousands of classrooms across the country on a daily basis.

It’s how I was tested when I was in fifth grade.

It’s also boring. Tedious. Mind numbing. If you’re an excellent speller, it can be excruciating.

When I give a spelling test, I challenge my students not to laugh during the test. I offer rewards for those who can refrain from giggling.

Then I proceed to use the spelling words in sentences designed to make even the most stoic of fifth graders want to laugh. I tell stories about students with underwear collections. Students whose lunch money was stolen by preschoolers. Boys with crushes on girls. Girls with crushes on boys. Students who are rabid fans of Justin Bieber, old pancakes, smelly shoes, wrinkle cream, and toe fungus. Students who spend their afternoons rolling in mud and befriending earthworms. Sometimes each sentence pertains to a different member of the class. Other times I connect all the sentences into one long, harrowing, hilarious story about a single member of the class.   

My students love spelling tests. They can’t wait for their spelling test.

I focus the lens of fun on every single thing thing I do in the classroom. It is the first issue I address when planning a lesson.

“How will I make this fun?”

Until I can answer this question, I go no further.

Sometimes fun is as simple as giving my students a choice. Allowing them to collaborate. Encouraging an unconventional approach. Permitting them to change locations. Affording them an unexpected freedom.

Sometimes it’s elaborate and unorthodox. Sometimes it requires props. Oftentimes it requires an enormous amount of creativity and planning.

Regardless, planning for fun is the best use of my time always.  

Fun is absent from education today. It is never taught or even spoken of in college classrooms, and it is never addressed in professional development. It is ignored, devalued, discarded, and routinely undermined by people with a multitude of credentials and a wealth of big ideas and very little memory of what it is like to be a kid and little understanding of what a kid needs.

Teachers are almost always the model students of their childhood classrooms. The homework completers. The high GPA achievers. The well behaved. The highly attentive. The college bound. These teachers tend to be trained by professors who were also the model students of their day. The kinds of students with enough determination, self regulation, and academic skill to ultimately earn advanced degrees in their chosen fields.  

This is a recipe for disaster. This creates an army of teachers who do no understand why students misbehave and ignore directions and care little about instruction or learning.

These are teachers who often fail to understand the value of fun in the classroom because they never needed fun in order to be successful.

Fun saves kids. Fun makes children happy. Fun is the most powerful learning strategy available to teachers today. Fun is the easiest and most effective way of helping a student to learn.

If only more teachers would use it.

The tyranny of the syllabus

I know a handful of college professors personally. I know a handful more via Facebook and Twitter. I have known many, many more throughout the years. Right around this time of the year, the discussions about their fabled syllabi begin to appear, both in real life and on social media.

Their comments can usually be boiled down into the following statements:

• I am working on my syllabus.
• I feel angst about my syllabus.
• The work that I’m doing on my syllabus is complex and time consuming.
• I am proud of the work that I have done on my syllabus.

As a teacher, I find this never-ending conversation about syllabi both amusing and disturbing.

Let’s start off with the dirty little secret of higher education:

Professors are not teachers. The great majority of them have almost no formal training and have never studied the art and science of teaching. They are experts in their specific fields of study, and if their students are lucky, they have received a modicum of training from the college or university where they teach (usually a week or two before the semester begins), but for the most part, they do not have any actual teaching certification, scholarship, or meaningful training.

This is not to say that their instruction is ineffective.

However, in many cases, it is highly ineffective. I have attended classes at six different institutions of higher learning, and I have met many professors who are experts in their field of study and utterly inept in the classroom.

Thankfully, I have also been taught by professors who are incredible teachers, too. For the most part, I suspect that these people possessed many of the innate qualities of an excellent teachers long before they entered the classroom. I also suspect that these professors have chosen to study the art and science of teaching with the same vigilance and rigor as they study in their field of expertise.

These people are teachers disguised as professors. They are highly effective, oftentimes inspiring, and sometimes life changing.

Unfortunately, they are too few in number.

Which bring me back to the syllabus:

The carefully designed plan for the entire semester. The source of both angst and pride of so many professors and students.

Also one of the most disastrous and ridiculous documents in the field of education.

The syllabus represents a professors plan for instruction for the course of approximately four months. It is disseminated to students at the beginning of the semester, and in most cases, it is adhered with rigor and fidelity. Due dates are predetermined and enforced. Readings are assigned and expected to be completed by the date indicated. Lectures and coursework is paced in accordance with the schedule set forth. Everything that students will be doing over the course of the semester is listed in clear, explicit language.

Ask a teacher to teach using a similar plan and he or she would laugh you right out of the classroom.

At its most fundamental level, teaching is a process that requires engaging instruction, ongoing assessment, constant differentiation, and relentless adjustment.

A syllabus is the antithesis of this. It represents uniformity. It dictates a predetermined pathway for instruction. It sets expectations that apply to all students, regardless of talent or ability. It predetermines precisely how long a group of learners will pursue a particular topic.

This is, of course, ludicrous. This is not teaching.

An example:    

My hope may be to finish reading Macbeth with my fifth grade students by September 28. That is my plan, and I have communicated it to them (though being fifth graders, I’m sure that most don’t remember this). But if my students don’t understand certain concepts in the play or are incredibly enthusiastic about the text or ask unexpected and surprising questions or despise Lady Macbeth with every fiber of their being, that September 28 deadline could easily drift forward or backward.

I will assess understanding and enthusiasm and adjust accordingly.

This is the essence of good teaching.

I will also adjust my instruction based upon my students’ individual needs. I will seek to understand those differing levels of ability and differentiate instruction based upon my students’ specific skill levels.

Nothing is static. There is no four month plan, because there can be no four month plan. I work with human beings. Not widgets. 

My plan is to study four Shakespearean plays before our winter break. That number may increase or decrease based upon any number of factors.

My students may be so thoroughly enthralled with tragedies that I decide to skip the comedies entirely. Or at least delay them until the spring. 

A graphic novel of Macbeth may be released that I decide to add to our study. Or a film. Or a play at a local theater. Or a student-created puppet show.

Any number of factors will alter content.

This is what teaching is all about. Engaging instruction and relentless adjustment.

But this is how many, and perhaps most, college classes are typically taught. The syllabus determines the what and when.

In a college classroom, assessment rarely drives instruction. The syllabus drives instruction. Assessment is used for determining grades. It does not determine which students require additional instruction. It does not signal to professors that their students require additional time or increased levels of challenge in order to achieve their greatest academic potential. 

“Greatest academic potential” is a state that all teachers seek for their students. But in order to achieve this state (or even strive towards it), a teacher must constantly monitor, assess, adjust, and differentiate.

I have almost never seen this process take place in a college classroom. 

Rarely is work at a college level differentiated. Despite obvious differences in the backgrounds and abilities of students, instruction is delivered to all students at the same time in the same way.

In college, differentiation is not done in the classroom. It is not handled through instruction. It is parceled out in 15-30 minute chunks known as office hours.

To an actual teacher, this is insanity.

I believe that it’s this relentless march though the syllabus that has led to the rise of online learning and MOOCs. Rather than acting as teachers, professors have presented themselves as content delivery systems. They set forth a plan and adhere to it, lecturing, assigning grades, and marching through their semester regardless of circumstance. 

You will read about Subject X before Monday. I will lecture about Subject X on Monday. We will engage in a class discussion. You will write a paper on Subject X, which is due the following Monday. I will assign you a numerical score based upon your adherence to a rubric that I have determined.

What about the student who struggled with the reading?

What about the student who was not challenged by the reading?

What about the class who does not find Subject X nearly as engrossing as you do?

What about the class that wants to spend another week discussing Subject X?

As a teacher and a former college student, I would like to see the college syllabus become more of an approximate plan for the semester, with fairly rigid timelines in place only in two week increments.

“Here is what we will be doing this week and next. It includes the readings and assignments. We’ll see how it goes. Then we’ll figure out the next two weeks. Because we are learners. Not robots.”

Teachers do not speak of their curriculum or lesson plans with nearly the same consternation or affection as a college professor does his or her syllabus because the teacher knows that curriculum and lesson plans are great until class begins. Then the real teaching starts.

As German general Helmuth Von Moltke said:

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”

A majority of college professors do not subscribe to this belief. They encounter the enemy (their students) and march forward, regardless of obstacle or resistance. 

Follow the syllabus. Administer the tests. Finish the semester. Ignore the wounded who litter the battlefield.

This is not teaching. It’s content delivery.

It’s a damn shame.

If I was able to choose my children’s teachers, this is what I would want more than anything else.

If I were allowed to choose the teachers for my children, I would almost always choose the teachers with the greatest variation of life experience.

Give me a teacher who has dug ditches in Nicaragua, survived an encounter with a grizzly bear, panhandled across Europe, or spent ten years working in the private sector over a teacher who went from high school to college to graduate school to the classroom, absent catastrophe, epic struggle, or life-altering cataclysm.

This is not to say that the traditional path to teaching produces bad teachers. I know many outstanding teachers who have followed this traditional approach. I simply place more faith in a diversity of life experience and the perspective that it brings than I do in a stable life and a college education.

As Mark Twain famously said, “I never let school interfere with my education.”

Some of the very best teachers who I have ever known came to teaching from the most unorthodox and challenging routes imaginable.

These are the teachers who are confident enough to both take enormous risks and constantly ask for help.

These are the teachers who easily distinguish between what is important to learning and what is meaningless fluff.

These are the teachers who know which corners can be cut and which are critical  to the success of their students.

These are the teachers who demand great things from their students and know how to shut their mouths and get out of the way in order to allow those students to exceed expectations.  

These teachers tend to be unflappable, remarkably resilient, highly efficient, supremely independent, and beloved by their students.

In the words of one of my fictional characters, these are the teachers who teach school rather than play school.

High school to college to graduate school may transform you into a great teacher. But a diversity of life experience, a broad and varied perspective of the world, and a life of epic struggle, cataclysmic failure, and modest success is what I would look for first if choosing a teacher.

This is what I hope to find in my children’s teachers, far more than advanced degrees in education from the finest universities.

I thought this TED Talk demonstrated the importance and value of a diversity of perspective perfectly. It’s a stark reminder of how easy it is to assume that you and the people around you are the norm, especially when you and the people around you have always been you and the people around you.   

The Louisiana Literacy Test of 1963 is astonishing. Impossibly difficult and truly evil. I think I’ll give it to my students.

The website of the Civil Rights Movement Veterans, which collects materials related to civil rights, posts samples of actual literacy tests used in the South  during the 1950s and 1960s.

These tests were designed to prevent African Americans from voting in local elections. They were purposely difficult and confusing, and many times, the questions were simply impossible to answer.

Slate recently ran a piece that included the Louisiana literacy test of 1963, which is “singular among its fellows.”

Designed to put the applicant through mental contortions, the test's questions are often confusingly worded. If some of them seem unanswerable, that effect was intentional. The (white) registrar would be the ultimate judge of whether an answer was correct.

The test was to be taken in 10 minutes, and a single wrong answer meant a failing grade.

The questions are astonishing in their Machiavellian degree of opacity. The people designing and administering these tests may have been racists, but they were clever racists.

Take the test, or at least take a moment and read the questions. It’s unbelievable.

I return to the classroom today to a new batch of fifth graders and a brand new school year. It occurs to me that it would be fascinating to give my students this test and see how the perform, and even better, how they react to some of these questions.

What better way to demonstrate the criminal inequities of the pre-Civil Rights era? 

 

Perfect cure for the first day of school blues

I love my job. I wanted to be a teacher when I was eight years-old, and for a long time in my life, I never thought that dream would come true. When you’re homeless and penniless, college starts to seem like a pipedream.

Despite my love for teaching, I love my summers more. This makes the first day of school a sad time for me. Gone are my long, lazy days with my wife and children. Gone is the freedom to golf or write or swim whenever I want.

Adding to the sadness of this year is the gradual disappearance of my closest friends at work. In the past five years, my wife and three of my closest friends (and many others) have either retired from teaching or moved onto other schools. I’ve begun to feel like the last man standing.

On top of all of this, the next two days are meeting days. Professional development. No bright-eyed, mischievous students to make my days fly by. Just adults. Talking at me. For hours and hours.

Happily, I have found a cure for the first day of school blues. It’s this video of son, who is watching a video of himself on one of those playground merry-go-rounds.

When I start to feel the pangs of sadness creeping in, I will watch this and be filled with joy.

Why does writing instruction so often suck?

Slate’s Matthew J.X. Malady offers any number of reasonable answers to this question, but I think the answer is far simpler:

Writing instruction at the elementary, middle, and high school levels is taught primarily by teachers who are not writers and do not engage in writing on a regular basis.

Most teachers are readers. We read for pleasure. We read novels, nonfiction, magazines, and endless amounts of text on the Internet. We are forced to read the material that we assign to our students in order to evaluate comprehension, lead discussions, and answer questions.

Most teachers are also mathematicians. We add, subtract, multiply, and divide on a daily basis. We work with fractions in the kitchen. We measure at the workbench. We solve the same problems that we ask our students to solve in order to teach, model, and diagnose errors.

Few teachers are writers.

A third grade teacher requires her class to write a fictional narrative that includes a magic key and a hole in a tree.

When was the last time that teacher sat down and wrote a fictional fictional narrative using a pre-assigned plot point?

A middle school teacher assigns his students an argumentative essay on the death penalty. When was the last time that teacher wrote a five paragraph essay on a pre-assigned topic?

A high school teacher requires her students to write a 15 page paper on the differences between Julius Caesar and Macbeth in Shakespeare’s plays. When was the last time that teacher wrote a paper on a pre-assigned topic, using pre-assigned readings, with a strict page limit?

How often does any teacher write anything similar to what he or she assigns students? How often do teachers write for pleasure?

When I conduct workshops on the teaching of writing, the first thing I tell my workshop attendees is that listening to me talk about the teaching of writing is not the best way to become a better teacher of writing. I invite them to flee my workshop immediately. Run away! Find a writing class at a local college, a museum, or in their town’s adult education program. Enroll. Start writing. Start writing every day. Becoming a writer, and learning to become a better writer, is the best (and perhaps the only) way to become a better teacher of writing.

When I assign my students an essay, I also write the essay and share my work with them. When I assign my students a series of open-ended questions, I will always answer at least one of them. When I teach my students about poetry or playwriting or personal narrative, I write alongside them. I invite them to peek over my shoulder and watch what I am doing, like I do to them. I understand the struggles and frustrations of a writer. I understand what is important to a writer. I understand the challenges that an assignment presents. I quickly learn about where I need to focus and redirect my instruction.

The question I get most often from teachers in my workshops is about how to motivate the reluctant writer. It’s always been the most difficult question for me to answer, because I have no specific strategy to recommend. I have no intervention to deploy. No tricks of the trade.

My students are always motivated to write. I do not say this to boast, and I am not exaggerating. In my 16 years as a teacher, I can count the number of truly reluctant writers in my classroom on one hand.

My students want to write because they perceive me as a writer. They see me write every day. I share my work with them. I tell stories about my struggles and successes. Most importantly, I know what a writer needs to write. I know what a writer wants. I know what it takes to motivate yourself when all of the words on the page look like garbage and all you want to do is play a video game or eat a cookie or read something, anything, better than what you are writing.

Instead of writing every day, teachers purchase books filled with prefabricated writing lessons and activities that no actual writer would ever even consider doing. They hang posters about some nonexistent, linear writing process on the wall. They attend workshops and expect that six hours spent in front of a successful teacher of writing will somehow fundamentally change their practice and improve their instruction. When I tell teachers that just 15 minutes a day, every day, is more than enough time to become a writer and begin to understand what their students truly need, they tell me that they don’t have the time.

There are no easy answers. No simple solutions or quick fixes. Writing is complex and emotional. It’s a struggle and a joy. It’s hard. Incredibly hard. If you want to help your students become better writers, become a writer yourself. Not even a good writer. Just a writer.    

That’s it. Just start writing.

Advice for teachers about to embark on another school year: Stay out of the classroom

I am entering my sixteenth year of teaching this year. I have learned many things over the course of my career. One of them is this.

For all of you teachers who are spending hours in your classrooms in the weeks before school starts, aligning bulletin boards along the horizontal and vertical axis, color-coding your classroom libraries, affixing perfectly penned nametags to little desks, hanging elaborate mobiles from the rafters, and otherwise creating colorful, print-rich environments:

Slow down. Relax. Stop, even. Go home during these last few days of summer vacation. None of this is as important as you think it is.

A sloppy assembled bulletin board by a team of students is always better than an aesthetically designed bit of bulletin board art designed by a teacher.

A disheveled library organized and maintained by students is always better than one carefully curated by a teacher.

A slightly less print rich environment with fewer splashed of primary colors is not going to make or break your school year.

You will be a far better teacher if you spend the countless hours that you normally use getting your classroom ready by reading.

Read a book that will improve or inspire you as a professional.

Read a book that you can recommend to your students.

Read a book from the pile that has been sitting on your nightstand for months.

Be the reader that you expect your students to be.

Or write. We ask our students to write every day, but so few of us model writing for our students.

Write some poetry that you can share with your students. Write a personal narrative about the worst day of your summer vacation. Write a short story. Engage in the writing process in a way that you will expect your students to this year. The understanding that you gain as a writer will be invaluable.

Be the writer you expect your students to be.

Or simply spend your final few days of vacation relaxing. Recharging the batteries. Exercising. Enjoying time with your family. 

All of these things will make you a far more effective teacher than the stuff that you are carefully affixing to walls, ceilings, and desks in these final days.

Let go of your need for perfection. Let go of your ascetic eccentricities. Let go of the fear that students, parents, and you colleagues will judge you based upon the appearance of your classroom. In the end, your classroom will account for less than one percent of your students’ success. It will be the relationships that you form with your students that will determine your effectiveness as a teacher.

Use this precious time to prepare yourself for a year of teaching.

Don’t spend this time preparing your classroom. Prepare yourself.

You’ll be shocked to discover who favors old fashioned ink and paper over digital composition

I’ve been teaching writing to students ages 12-16 for the past three weeks. Seven students in all. Every one of them is an excellent writer. A couple are legitimately gifted.

Two surprises:

1. Five of my students write with a paper and pen and couldn’t imagine writing on a computer or tablet, at least for their first draft. Only one writes exclusively on a laptop (and she writes primarily for the Internet), and the other switches between pen-and-paper and her phone.
2. A different five read almost exclusively from old fashioned books. Paper and ink. One reads exclusively on a tablet. The last switches between formats.

I was stunned when I saw these teenagers scribbling in journals and flipping through through pages. It’s not what I expected.

A month ago, I was walking down a long line of people waiting to attend a Moth StorySLAM in NYC, and I was both surprised and pleased with the number of people standing in line, passing the time by reading ink and paper books.

Could this be a sign that people are seeking a greater balance between digital and analog?

I hope so. 

The ad has good intentions, but it doesn’t depict reality, and that could be more damaging to girls than no ad at all.

This new Verizon-sponsored ad, which was made in conjunction with Makers to show how parents unintentionally steer their daughters away from science and math, is receiving a lot of praise for the way it doesn’t focus solely on female body and beauty issues, as well as its willingness to shine the light on the role that parents play in the problem. 

Amanda Marcotte of Slate calls it a “blast of refreshing cool air.”

I understand why critics like the ad so much, but here’s my problem with it:

Are there really parents in the world as sexist and stupid as the ones depicted in the commercial?

I’m not sure. If there are parents like this, they are hardly in the majority. 

There are four incidents depicted in the commercial during which the girl is supposedly steered away from science.

First, while hiking up a mountain and through a stream while wearing rubber boots, her mother says, “Sammy, don’t get your dress dirty.”

On a hike? Up a mountain? In a stream? Is there some fine dining establishment at the summit with a strict dress code? Is this rocky, mountain trail also the path to Sammy’s kindergarten graduation?

Next, a slightly older Sammy is standing in a tidal pool, holding a starfish. Dad says, “You don’t want to mess with that. Why don’t you put it down.”

A starfish? Not an angry crab. Not a potentially poisonous sea urchin. Perhaps the most defenseless creature on the entire planet: A starfish.

Next, Sammy is hanging spheres decorated as planets over her bed. Her mother pokes her head into her bedroom and says, “This project has gotten out of control.”

Perhaps it’s the use of glitter, which should be banned from the Earth, that has gotten her mother’s knickers in a bunch. I could understand this concern. I’d even be willing to support the mother’s discontent. But other than the possible overuse of glitter, what exactly has “gotten out of control?” Was Sammy’s mother thinking that her solar system would consist of just eight planets, but Sammy foolishly made thirteen?

The last example is the worst. Teenage Sammy is drilling a screw into a model rocket while her older brother looks on. Dad shouts, “Whoa. Be careful with that (drill). Why don’t you hand it to your brother.”

Not a table saw. Not a weaponized laser beam. Not a nail gun. A drill.

I’m not saying that girls can’t use table saws, weaponized laser beams, or nail guns, but as a parent, I can understand the concern for any teenager (or me) using these tools. But a drill is one step removed from an egg beater. It’s one of the most benign of all the power tools. What damage could Sammy possibly do with a drill?

I believe that parents play a role in a girl’s decisions to turn away from science and math. I just don’t believe that it’s typically (or ever) done in such ham-handed, overtly sexist ways as depicted in this commercial. 

Most important, unrealistic and exaggerated ads like this make it too easy for parents to watch them and think, “I’d never do anything like that,” while ignoring the more subtle signals that we send to our girls everyday.

When we show parents the worst examples of parenting, we offer them the opportunity to feel good about themselves and their own parenting, when in truth, they may be just as guilty of the same kinds of behavior that this ad depicts, only in more subtle and realistic forms.  

“Fun” is the word most often missing from education today. It’s practically nonexistent.

I have many goals as a teacher, but my primary goal, is to make school a fun and memorable place that kids want to return to daily.

I want my students to despise Saturday and Sunday.

I want them to lament the approach of summer vacation.

Lofty and perhaps unattainable goals, but ones I strive for daily.   

If my students love school, I have won.

To that end, I have an endless array of strategies to make every day a little different, a little special, and most of all, fun for my students.

I believe that “fun” is the word most often missing in education today. I believe that if teachers sought to make the school day more fun for their students, learning would increase exponentially.

 

A few months ago, I received a note from a student that let me know that I was on the path of accomplishing my goal this year, at least for her.   
__________________________

Dear Mr. Dicks, 

As you can tell I am not here today. I am out sick because I threw up many times. I was determined to go to school. . . Until I threw up again. Then I realized, “Oh no! I need to go to school. I really did. Something might happen when I’m not there! Something always happens!” My mom told me I should stay home, but I told her what you always say. . . "You never know what you could miss out on if you miss school!" Then I threw up again. So I guess I’m staying home. Don’t do anything too fun today. Please?

Students can do amazing things when they want to annoy their teacher.

I have forbidden two students in my class from bickering, because it makes me crazy.

Last week I hear singing coming from the general vicinity of the normally bickering students. I listen closely. It’s the two bickering students, taking turns singing what sounds to be an improvised song of sorts.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Singing insults at each other,” one says.

“Why?” I ask.

“You told us not to bicker, so we decided to sing at each other when we’re mad. It’s not technically bickering.”

The two were smiling from ear-to-ear, pleased with themselves for this clever circumvention of my rule.

Best of all, these two constantly bickering students put their heads together and devised and executed a plan specifically designed to annoy me.

Naturally, I forbid them from signing insults at each other, but not before taking pride in their ingenuity and ability to come together to defeat their common enemy.

Best Teacher Appreciation Day gift ever

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, my students presented me with a  gift on Friday.

The first was a PowerPoint presentation that explained why I was an excellent teacher. It included many inside jokes, a song that the kids performed, a few veiled insults, and a couple of slides that meant a great deal to me, including this one:

Damn those kids. Not only have they grasped my nonchalance about what we do in class everyday (and maybe even a bit of my self-doubt), but best of all, they used the correct form of your/you’re.

Twice.

Then they handed me a list of every student’s name. Alongside each name was one thing that they appreciated most about me. Some were sincere. Some were silly. A couple were cruel. All were perfect. 

Lastly, they handed me a gift bag containing a box of Pop Tarts (strawberry and frosted, of course) and a gift card to McDonald’s.

Apparently it only takes about 160 school days for a bunch of kids to understand you at your core. 

Chipotle and education: Upside-down organizations where the best people are removed from the most important positions

This piece on how Chipotle develops their management team is fascinating. Essentially, the company builds from within, plucking cashier, cooks and other highly effective, downstream employees and rapidly elevating them through training and incentives to management positions.

Last year, nearly 86% of Chipotle's salaried managers and 96% of hourly managers were the result of internal promotions. 

Fundamental to this transformation is something Chipotle calls the restaurateur program, which allows hourly crew members to become managers earning well over $100,000 a year.

I became a McDonald’s manager through a similar, albeit less profitable, path. I started working for the company when I was 16 years old. By the time I was 17, I had been promoted to an hourly manager, and less than two years later, I was a salaried manager.

Promoting from within is an admirable and profitable means of identifying and training future managers, but despite this democratic, pluralistic approach, Chipotle, like McDonald’s, is an upside-down organization.

At Chipotle and McDonald’s, the greater your level of advancement, the farther away you step from the customer. In order to climb the corporate ladder at Chipotle, McDonald’s and many other businesses, you must distance yourself more and more from the point of sale. But it’s the point of sale that is the most critical position in the organization in terms of profitability for a consumer-facing company.

It’s where your best people should be.

Time and time again, I would watch highly effective restaurant managers leave their  stores for corporate positions, leaving behind a less effective, less profitable managers in their place. These corporate positions generated no profit for the company. Employees in these positions did not interact with customers or drive sales. In McDonald’s and Chipotle and many other businesses, these promotions often remove the most skilled and effective people in the organization from the most critical positions in the company.

I’ve never thought it made much sense.

Sadly, education also operates with an upside-down model. In many ways, the bottom rung of the ladder in education is the teacher. In order to improve your pay beyond a teacher’s salary and climb the career ladder, a person must leave the classroom and become a principal, curriculum specialist, administrator, coach or something similar that removes these people from the most critical position in all of teaching:

The classroom.

If a highly effective teacher wants to increase his or her salary significantly, he or she must step away from students and do work that has a considerably reduced impact on the actual instruction and future of children.

In business terms, these people are stepping away from the point of sale.

People in these positions may try to tell you otherwise. They may say that their work as a principal or administrator or coach helps teachers to be more effective by ensuring adequate training or support or by fostering a climate where both teachers and students can thrive. They often argue that they are indirectly helping more students through their work than a single classroom teacher.

This, of course, is bunk.

If you want to make the greatest difference in the lives of students, become a teacher. The best principal I have ever known would tell you the same.

Sadly, in today’s world, the classroom is viewed by many as a place that must be escaped by many teachers. The list of responsibilities of a classroom teacher is impossibly long and grows longer each year. The number of people, both students and adults, who the classroom teacher must interact with is immense. It is often acknowledged that the classroom teacher has the most difficult position in all of education.

The classroom is not for the faint of heart.

That’s why the position of classroom teacher should be viewed as the most prestigious in all of education. People should not be promoted from the classroom. If anything, people should be promoted into the classroom.

Classroom teachers should be paid the most.

In countries like Finland, which boast the most successful education systems in the world, they are.

In education, if you have an office, you probably need a pay cut. A portion of your salary should probably go to a teacher who works directly with students throughout the day.

If you are not standing in front of students on a minute-by-minute basis during your work day, you probably need a pay cut. A portion of your salary should probably go to a teacher who in the classroom all day long.

Send those dollars where they belong: Into the pockets of teachers.

The people who should be paid the most money in education are the classroom teachers. Rather than having teachers fight like dogs for a scant few administrative positions, our most effective people should be fighting for classroom positions, where they can significantly impact the lives of 20-25 children each year.     

Education, like Chipotle and McDonald’s and so many others, is upside down. The goal should be to remain as close to the customer as possible.

Not escape them. 

Pay and prestige should be trickling down in these organizations to the people who make the biggest difference in terms organizational success.

Not up.

Mary Poppins was right about teaching. We would all do well to listen to her.

Mary Poppins's words:

"In every job that must be done / There is an element of fun."

If I have been a successful teacher, it is because I have always believed that if my students are having fun, they will do whatever I ask of them.

I have learned many things and developed many strategies over my fifteen year teaching career, but the most important skills that I have acquired are the ones that make learning fun for my students.

When planning a lesson, I begin with the assumption that no one in my class wants to learn or even listen to me. Based upon that assumption, the first thing I ask myself is how I will make the lesson fun.

Until I can answer that question, I do not move forward with the planning. There is no reason for me to plan a lesson for my students that will not be fun.

Years ago, I attempted to get the word “fun” included in our school’s mission statement, only to be discounted and ridiculed for suggesting it.

If we want to increase learning and student engagement in our classrooms, the most immediate and effective thing teachers could do is make fun a priority in their classroom.

The most immediate and effective thing that colleges and universities could do is to train their future teachers in the planning and execution of lessons that are fun for students.

The most immediate and effective thing that administrators could do is make “fun” as a criteria for teacher evaluation.

Mary Poppins was right. We need to start listening to her if we want our students to succeed. 

Words of encouragement

It’s a rare thing when the worst part of feeling the worst ever is missing work because it means missing your students.

Lest I forget how much I miss them when I am not at school, I received several emails from students yesterday, including this one:

Hi Mr.Dicks. I heard you were sick. I hope you feel better. Remember we will always want you here.
Come back tomorrow please.

I also received this one:

I thought you were a tough guy. Get out of bed and get back to school.

Also this one:

I guess your record of not throwing up in like 30 or more years is up. Oh well. Get over it and get back to school.

Nice to see that I have taught them well.

Pressure is a privilege

Author Susan Schoenberger posted this quote to her Twitter feed:

"Pressure is a privilege." - Billie Jean King as heard on Fresh Air.

I love this idea. It’s so true.

Many of the things that I choose to do involve pressure.

I stand before 21 students every day, knowing full well that I am responsible for their academic success, and that a portion of their future professional success is in my hands.

I do not take this responsibility lightly. I worry about my students a lot.

I write novels. I choose every word. I create every character, every setting and every scenario. Then I send my story into the world for public consumption and comment.

The success of the book is based almost entirely on my ability to create a story that readers love. The viability of my writing career hinges on the success of each book.

I am a storyteller. I stand before as many of 1,500 people at a time and share a true story from my life in hopes that they will be entertained and moved.

If I am competing in a StorySLAM, my story will immediately be followed with a numerical assignation of my performance by teams of complete strangers.

I am a wedding DJ. I am the person most responsible for the most important day in the lives of the couple who have hired me. Along with my partner, we coordinate every minute of the wedding. I feel more pressure on a person’s wedding day than any other day of the year. I understand how important this day is to them.

There are days when I yearn for a less pressure-filled life. I recently saw a parking garage attendant sitting in a booth, reading a book, listening to  music. While I understand that the person in that booth doesn’t earn as much as someone in my position, I found myself envious of him just the same. He was getting paid to perform a simple, stress-free job that allowed him to read a book and relax while on the job.

There are days when that sounds damn fine.

But Billie Jean King was right. Pressure is a privilege. It leads to a full, rewarding, memorable and meaningful life.

I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Most of the time.