Unacceptable platitude #7: “Fair does not mean equal.”

“Fair does not mean equal” is a convenient phrase that is overly used in situations in which inequality exists and the ability to mitigate that inequality either doesn’t exist for structural or financial reasons or is beyond the intellectual and creative abilities of the people in charge to eliminate altogether. 

In other words, yes, “fair does not mean equal” is sometimes applicable.

More often, however, “fair does not mean equal” its supervisory nonsense spouted by a manager, teacher, or parent who is incapable or unwilling to reach an equitable solution for their subordinates. It’s a phrase that is often friendly to the budget and the people in charge and detrimental and demeaning to the people for whom it is being applied. 

Fair should mean equal whenever possible.

Fair should almost always mean equal.

Fair meaning equal should be the goal.

Don’t ever allow this management-friendly phrase to stand as truth.

Shortcomings and Flaws: 2014

A reader once accused me of being materialistic after I wrote about my lack of a favorite number, specifically criticizing me for saying that when it comes to my salary, my favorite number is the largest number possible.

You can read about that debate here if you would like.

After refuting the charges of materialism, I acknowledged that I had plenty of other shortcomings and offered to list them in order to appease my angry reader. I did. Then I added to the list when friends suggested that I had forgotten a few.

Nice friends. Huh?

image

So began an annual tradition of posting my list of flaws and shortcomings. Here is the revised list for 2014. I’ve added 4 items (the last 4) and removed 3 items from the list, bringing my total to 30.

The items that I have removed include:

• I forget my EpiPen far too often. - I have enough EpiPens to strategically place them so that I am rarely without one.
• I cannot snap a onesie correctly. - My children no longer wear onesies, conveniently eliminating this shortcoming.
• I have developed a tendency to express my displeasure or boredom with people through unconscious verbal exhalations and sighs. - Having been made aware of this two years ago, I worked hard and managed to eliminate this tendency.

If you have a suggestion for a flaw or shortcoming that you do not see on the list, please feel free to submit it for review.

Matthew Dicks’s List of Shortcomings and Flaws

1. I have difficulty being agreeable even when the outcome means nothing to me but means a great deal to someone else.

2. I have a limited palate (though I would like to stress that this is not by choice).

3. I often lack tact, particularly in circumstances in which tact is especially important.

4. I am a below average golfer.

5. It is hard for me to sympathize with adults with difficulties that I do not understand, do not think are worthy of sympathy and/or are suffering with difficulties that I would have avoided entirely.

6. I have difficulty putting myself in another person’s shoes. Rather than attempting understand the person, I envision myself within their context and point out what I would have done instead.

7. When it comes to argument and debate, I often lack restraint. I will use everything in my arsenal in order to win, even if this means hurting the other person’s feelings in the process.

8. I do many things for the sake of spite.

9. I have an unreasonable fear of needles.

10. I become angry and petulant when told what to wear.

11. Bees kill me dead.

12. I am incapable of carrying on small talk for any length of time and become extremely irritable and uncomfortable when forced to do so.

13. I become sullen and inconsolable when the New England Patriots lose a football game.

14. I lack adequate compassion and empathy for adults who are not very smart or resourceful or are easily overwhelmed.

15. I can form strong opinions about things that I possess a limited knowledge of and are inconsequential to me.

16. Field of Dreams makes me cry every time without fail.

17. I am unable to make the simplest of household or automobile repairs.

18. I would rarely change the sheets on my bed if not for my wife.

19. I eat ice cream too quickly.

20. I procrastinate when it comes to tasks that require the use of the telephone.

21. I am uncomfortable and ineffective at haggling for a better price.

22. I am exceptionally hard on myself when I fail to reach a goal or meet a deadline.

23. I take little pleasure in walking.

24. Sharing food in restaurants annoys me.

25. I drink too much Diet Coke.

26. My hatred for meetings of almost any kind cause me to be unproductive, inattentive, and obstructionist.

27. Disorganization and clutter negatively impacts my mood, particularly when I cannot control it.

28. I am overly critical of my fellow storytellers, applying my own rules and standards to their performances.

29. I cannot load a dishwasher effectively.

30. I think less of people who nap.

Stupid yoga may be turning my son into a dweeb. Or perhaps he’s trying to get the attention of women like his father once did.

I’m not sure what’s going on here.

 

Maybe his yoga class is influencing the way that he sits now.

Maybe television isn’t exciting enough anymore, and he’s looking for ways to change it up.

Maybe this is his Dead Poets Society moment. Instead of standing on his desk to get a new perspective on the world, he’s trying something a little less dramatic.

I walked into the living room and found my son sitting like this while watching Dora the Explorer. And not just for a moment. I came back 15 minutes later as the show was ending and found him in the same position.

When I was in middle school, I trained myself to read books upside down in an attempt to annoy my teachers and get the attention of girls.

One of those two things happened. I’ll let you guess which one.

Hopefully this new way of sitting is a temporary thing. As an expert in nonconformity, I am certain that his preschool teachers will not appreciate this one bit next year.

Office space turned dance hall, yoga studio, lunch room hell. I bet they’re all organic, gluten-free, transcendentalist vegans, too.

We’ve come a long way since Mike Judge’s Office Space highlighted the drudgery and monotony of cubicle life.

Some offices may have gone a little too far.

This German office may seem brilliant in terms of its use of space, but it strikes me as a little unrealistic and smug. A little cultish, even. No? 

My five year-old daughter has discovered the BEST COMEBACK EVER

My five year-old daughter is a rhetorical genius.

When I attempt to convince Clara that a two minute living room clean up is not a long time, or that the last piece of grilled cheese can be eaten in seconds, or that it’s always a good idea to try to use the bathroom before going on a long trip, her response is the same:

“Not to me.”

And it’s brilliant.

It’s true. Two minutes may seem like a long time to her.

It’s true. That last piece of grilled cheese might be incredibly difficult to eat.

And yes, just because I think something is a good idea does not mean that she will think the same.

“Not to me.”

Essentially, Clara is telling me that her reality and my reality are not the same, and that imposing my reality upon her will not work.

This is a reasonable and rationale position to take. Also rhetorically brilliant.

Annoyingly so. 

September 26, 1983: The day a Soviet colonel and forgotten hero saved the world from nuclear destruction.

On this day, let us not forgot the man who may have saved the human race from possible extinction.

September 26, 1983. The Cold War is at its height. The United States and the Soviet Union have thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles pointed at each other. The two countries exist under the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.  

Tensions between the two countries are especially high. Three weeks prior, the Soviet Union mistook Korean Air Flight 007 for a spy plane and shot it down, killing all 269 on board, including a United States congressman. 

In a bunker near Moscow, Soviet Colonel Stanislav Petrov is monitoring for signs of a United States nuclear attack when his system detects a launch.

His country is under attack. 

In the case of a launch detection, Petrov’s orders are clear:

Report the launch immediately so that the Soviet Union can retaliate before being destroyed by United States and NATO missiles.

Petrov ignores this order. He does not report the launch to his superiors. Instead, he declares the system's indication to be a false alarm.

With the threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles already in the air, poised to destroy his country, Petrov examines all the data and makes a decision that may have saved the human race.

Shortly thereafter, it’s determined that he is correct. The computer detection system was malfunctioning. It’s subsequently determined that the false alarm had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds.

Would the report of a US missile launch prompted Soviet military leaders to launch their own missiles in retaliation?

Thanks to Stanislav Petrov, we will never know.

Poop is here.

“I poop!” and “Poop is here!” are the two ways that my son signals the need for a diaper change.

I’m never a fan of a diaper change, but I have to say that his choice of words always make me smile.

ESPN makes the same stupid mistake that they criticized NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for two months ago.

Bill Simmons is suspended by ESPN for three weeks after calling NFL commissioner Roger Goodell “a liar” after the commissioner claimed that he never saw the Ray Rice video in which the running back punches his then fiancée on a Las Vegas elevator and knocks her out.

Police report that the video of the incident was handed over to the NFL in April. 

Back in July, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith implies that Ray Rice’s fiancée had some culpability in her beating and advises women to be wary about provoking their spouses into domestic violence.

He is suspended for two weeks.

Are companies like the NFL and ESPN trying to make us hate them?

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.

My daughter received her first library card. Her father might be more excited about it than she is, and for good reason.

My daughter received her first library card last weekend. She was thrilled.

I think my wife and I were even more excited than she was.

She also checked out her first book with it: If You Give a Moose a Muffin.

   

I didn’t receive my first library card until I was ten years-old. There were very few books in my home when I was growing up, so my library card represented access to a world never before seen by me. I loved my public library, despite it’s miniscule size (a single room of books) and placement in the basement of our town hall. I would walk the aisles, staring at the spines of the books, unable to fathom how many stories were now available to me.

Today my hometown library is a beautiful building located in what used to be my middle school. It’s enormous, illuminated by natural light, filled with more books than my childhood mind could have ever imagined, and equipped with all the amenities of a modern-day library.

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking there on a few occasions, and while I adore the space, I still hold a special place in my heart for that small, basement room in the town hall where so many doors opened for me for the first time.

After some sleuthing by a clever reader, I even managed to identify and locate the first library book that I ever checked out, and a copy sits on my bookshelf today.

I have yet to reread it, fearful that it won’t be as spellbinding as I remember it to be, but I’ll crack it open soon.

Today copies of all three of my novels can be found in the same library where my daughter received her first library card All three can also be found on the shelves of my hometown library.

This astounds me. My heart still flutters every time I see one of my novels on a bookstore shelf, but seeing them on the shelves of these two libraries means more to me than I can describe.

I have wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember, but in my wildest boyhood dreams, I never imagined that my books would someday find their way onto the shelves of the library where the world of books and reading first opened to me.

And as a parent, the idea that my books are sitting on the shelves of the same library where my daughter received her first library card is equally indescribable.

My daughter was decidedly less impressed, and she is never terribly  excited about seeing her father’s books on library or bookstore shelves. That’s okay. My novels don’t have any pictures, and the endings aren’t always happy.

As long as she’s reading something, I don’t care.

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.

This author found a way to sell books with sticks and leaves and a little bit of twine.

Last weekend I took my children to Winding Trails in Farmington, Connecticut, to a Fairy House Tour. I had never heard of such a thing and had no idea what to expect.

I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest. But it was brilliant.

Based upon author Tracy Kane’s Fairy Houses series, local organizations were invited to construct elaborate fairy houses from natural materials that were then placed throughout the woods for the children to find and examine. There must’ve been three or four dozen houses in all, each one more elaborate than the next.

The kids adored it.

At the end of the trail, the kids were given the opportunity to build their own fairy houses using materials provided by the camp.

The event culminated with a reading at the entrance to the trail and a book signing. A brilliant bit of marketing by the author, who sold many books.

     

It led me to wonder what I might do to similarly market my books.

Invite people to recreate life-sized versions of their imaginary friends and bring them to a Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend cocktail party?

Create a Something Missing book club game wherein each guest is sent into a room and tasked with stealing an item that would go unnoticed?

Design an Unexpectedly, Milo online game wherein players watch video diaries in order to determine the biography of the person speaking?

None are nearly as good as a Fairy House tour, I’m afraid.

    

Our unusually dark and strange family lullaby

About two years ago, I sat down with my infant son to rock him to sleep. Regina Spektor’s song On the Radio was running through my head, so I decided to sing it to him. He smiled and slowly fell asleep.

That same night, my three year-old daughter asked me to sing to her before bed. With On the Radio still in my head, I sang it to her as well.

Two years later, this song has become my children’s lullaby. It is the most requested song at bedtime, and my song specifically requests it by name. Both of my children know all the words, and my son will often sing it with me.

It occurs to me that this is not your usual lullaby. While the song has a slow, steady beat, the lyrics are oftentimes odd and nonsensical and cover topics that you wouldn’t expect to find in a lullaby, including:

• Driving a hearse into a crowd of people
• Laughing until you’re dead
• Locating worms to increase the rate of decay
• Being stung by a million bees
• Diseased loved ones
• A Guns N’ Roses song
• Growing old
• The end of love
• Breathing your last breath

I anticipate many questions when our children get older.

Questions like, “What the hell were you thinking?” and “Of all the songs you could’ve chosen, why one about decay and death and worms?”

My answer will be simple:

“You liked it.”

The Grecian Bend was stupid, but no. Heels are still stupider.

Slate’s Rebecca Onion recently proposed that the Grecian Bend was the most preposterous ladies’ fashion trend of all time.

In the 1860s, it was fashionable for American women to wear their skirts gathered at the back into panniers, with a bustle serving as the base upon which all of that fabric could be pinned. The style required the woman to lean forward in an exaggerated way, in order to compensate for all of that weight at her back. This lean, exacerbated by corsets and high-heeled shoes, came to be called the “Grecian Bend,” named after the way that women in some Greek sculptures hunched their shoulders in implied modesty at their nudity.

I disagree. As stupid as the Grecian Bend may have been, heels are by far stupider.

Heels, which were originally worn by men before they sensibly abandoned them, cause lower back pain, sciatica, shortened Achilles tendons, spider veins, bone and nerve damage, osteoarthritis, knee problems, foot problems (including ball-in-foot pain, metatarsalgia, bunions, hammer toe, and the “pump bump”). Heels can also permanently alter a woman’s posture and create serious problems with hip ligaments and tendons. They are also the leading cause of falls and sprained ankles in women.

Not to mention the vast numbers of women who die in disaster movies because of their inability to run quickly or climb in heels.

Of all the fashion trends over the centuries (including those horrifying earlobe expanders), the heel is by far the stupidest and most dangerous of all.

If heels of all kinds disappeared from the planet tomorrow, women would still be just as beautiful as they are today.

Even more beautiful, since some of the heels that are worn today look downright ridiculous. 

More importantly, they would also be safer, more comfortable, and much healthier over the course of their lives.

I have a five year-old daughter. My hope is that she will never indulge in both heels and the Grecian Bend.

But if I had to choose one, I would opt for the social debilitation of the Grecian Bend over the physical debilitation that will inevitably result from the wearing of heels.

There was a dead man in our hotel room.

Slate asks:

What protocol does a hotel follow when a guest is found dead?

Turns out I have a little bit of experience with this question.

When I was 23 years-old, my friend and I went on vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Caroline and Orlando, Florida. We drove south by car, stopping in Myrtle Beach for three days before proceeding to Orlando and Universal Studios. We were scheduled to stay in Florida for four days, but after two, we decided to head north and spend our last two days back at Myrtle Beach.

We liked it much better.

We drove all night from Florida to South Carolina and spent the morning sleeping on the beach. With our funds running low, we searched for a cheap room and found one over a liquor store less than a mile from the ocean. When the liquor store owner opened the door to the room, we saw the chalk outline of a person in the carpet in the center of the room.

“Haven’t had time to shampoo the rug,” the man said. “But he’s long gone.”

Since police don’t normally draw chalk outlines around heart attack or stroke victims, we assumed that the man had died via nefarious means.

Turns out that the chalk outline wasn’t so bad. The enormous cockroach that we found in the bathroom was far more terrifying.

Star Wars is nothing without the music

Purposeful procrastination: Are slightly lower grades really all that bad?

A new study suggests that students who turn in homework at the last minute get worse grades.

Of the 777 students involved, 86.1 percent waited until the last 24 hours to turn in work, earning an average score of 64.04, compared to early submitters’ average of 64.32 — roughly equivalent to a ‘B’ grade.

But the average score for the most part continued to drop by the hour, and those who turned in the assignment at the last minute had the lowest average grade of around 59, or around a C+.

It’s a bit of a no brainer and something that a reasonable person might have accurately assumed absent this research, but I think a more important question remains unanswered:

Are the procrastinators learning less?

I am a strong advocate of purposeful procrastination in all non-critical tasks. If I report is due to my boss on Friday, I will wait until the last possible moment to begin working on it, filling my time in between with more meaningful and enjoyable tasks. Being constantly concerned with the prospect of death, the last thing I want to do is spend my final day on Earth completing something mundane or ultimately unnecessary that I could’ve been done three days later.

Many think that factoring in the possibility of death into my to-do list is fairly insane, but those critics will die someday, and it will probably be on a crisp, September day spent sorting receipts for next year’s taxes.

As a purposeful procrastinator, I’m left wondering if the procrastinators in this study who are turning in work at the last moment and achieving slightly lower grades are actually learning less, or are their grades merely a reflection of a rushed effort that contains all of the learning required but with less polish?

And if so, do these lower grades actually matter? If the procrastinators and the non-procrastinators are equal in their learning, do the slightly higher grades of the non-procrastinators yield a greater number of job offers? Higher starting salaries? More rapid advancement?

In most cases, I don’t think so.

I’d also love to see the differences in happiness between procrastinators and non-procrastinators. In my admittedly biased and anecdotal experience, the procrastinators of the world seem to be a more relaxed and less anxious group of people. They seem to handle stress and uncertainty better. They appear to be less concerned with the opinions of others. They are not the ardent people-pleasers that aggressive completionists tend to be.

Don’t get me wrong. All procrastination is not good. Allowing your laundry to reach the point that you must devote an entire day to it is not a good idea. Waiting until the last minute to write your novel will probably result in a poor effort. Forgoing your oil change for another 5,000 miles is not a wise decision.

But a fairly innocuous college assignment?

Maybe the slightly lower grade isn’t such a bad thing if you fill the time that you spend procrastinating with something that is meaningful or joyful or more valuable.

And perhaps the process of completing the assignment at the last minute has its benefits as well. By purposefully procrastinating, maybe a person learns to manage stress better. Focus more effectively. Handle uncertainty with greater deftness.

This is the kind of research that I would like to see.

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.

My children visited a bookstore on the last day of summer. Their behavior was shocking.

We spent the last day of summer on the Connecticut shoreline. Among our choice of activities was a visit to our favorite bookstore, R.J. Julia in Madison, Connecticut.

 

Elysha and I once spent hours in bookstores, but when our children entered our lives, that changed. We tried for a while to do some tag-team parenting.  One parent relaxes while the other stops the monsters from ripping every book off the shelf.

It wasn’t fun.

But something happened on that last day of summer. I brought the kids upstairs to the children’s section of the bookstore, and within a minute, with no intervention on my part, this happened:

 

Not only did they plop themselves down and start reading, but they remained this way for a full 30 minutes.

Just imagine how much better it will be when they can actually read!

I probably couldn’t leave them unattended and descend to the adult section, but while my wife browsed below, I browsed the children’s section, which I sort of love anyway. I’ve written a few picture books that I am hoping to  eventually sell, and I missed out on these books as a child, so I still have lots of catching up to do. 

Even if this weren’t the case, this is a huge improvement over chasing them around, shushing them, and returning strewn books to the shelves.

This is good.

There is hope for the future.

My best piece of parenting advice

It takes a special and exceedingly wise breed of parent to ignore a temper tantrum like this and instead retrieve the camera and document the moment for posterity.

My wife is that kind of parent. She gets it.

I have a great deal of parenting advice to offer. Most people think that I am full of bluster and hubris. You probably do, too.

But I believe that my 16 years of teaching experience, in combination with my experience raising a former stepdaughter to the age of 16 and my two own children has given me wisdom that would prove valuable to anyone willing to listen.

Few admittedly do.

A colleague recently suggested to a parent that she ask me for advice on a childrearing issue. The person laughed. So did two other people at the table. The notion that I could have anything useful to offer was ludicrous in their minds. 

Regardless, this photo of Charlie’s tantrum reminded me of my best piece of parenting advice that I have to offer:

Don’t become emotionally attached to your child’s poor decision making, regardless of their age. If your two year-old son is having a tantrum because he isn’t getting what he wants, that’s his deal. You can help him process his emotions and calm down, but the fact that he is having a tantrum should not impact you emotionally.

It’s not about you. 

Instead, ignore the tantrum and take a photo. Capture the moment for future blackmail.