I'm never quite sure what to say. For what it's worth, here was my response:

> stress and anger management.

Heh. That seemed to define my first year.

The crappy thing about teaching is that (I'm convinced) no one knows how to teach how to do it. For all the talk of "education", the people who are supposed masters are basically throwing us inn the deep end of the pond, and seeing who stays afloat.

That being said, here are a couple of ideas that stuck with me from my first year:

- You are responsible for the kids in your classroom. If they're not learning, its your fault. Sure, it's easy to blame parents or gangs or whatever else, but the truth of it is that for most of those kids, there is a teacher somewhere on that campus who's made them want to learn. Be like those teachers, not the ones who constantly complain about the kids. This sucks to hear, but I've seen too many teachers with good potential get ruined because they couldn't believe that changing what they did would change the kids.

- Observe observe observe. Use your conference period. Find out who's good at classroom management, and go watch them teach. If you don't see them in the first week of school, you won't see how they got there. But you will see that it's possible. (To which - every new teacher should be required to watch the 5 best classroom managers on campus for the first week of school, lesson planning be damned.)

- Only change one thing at a time. If you feel out of control, accept most of it for what it is, and only work on changing one thing about yourself at a time. The first thing I worked on was not answering a kid who just yelled at me - I had to teach myself to wait for them to raise their hand. I had post it notes reminding me of that everywhere. The kids laughed at me, didn't change much, but eventually learned that they had to respond to me rather than the other way around.

- Make your expectations clear, in excruciating detail. Repeatedly. I spend about a week at the beginning of the year teaching them (as opposed to just telling them) my expectations. And still, every day, I need to remind my 5th period what they're supposed to do before the tardy bell rings. Every week when I give a test, I go over the 3 rules. Even then, I'll have a kid who starts talking before the test was completely over. But it happens rarely. If a kid ever does something I don't want them to do, and I haven't taught them about that, I take it as my fault. Sure it seems like they should know how to do some stuff as a student, but the reality is that they want to know that you know how they're supposed to act before they're willing to put in the effort.

Prevention is worth tons of cure, and I haven't so much learned to manage my anger as find ways to prevent things that might make me angry from happening. I spent a full month of seven hour days during the summer after my first year making a list of things the kids did that drove me nuts, and then coming up with alternate behaviors to teach them, and then lessons to teach those things. Eventually, I got good at catching the precursors to those things as well as communicating those expectations, to the point where I can substitute a class from hell and have them eating out of my hand in 5 minutes.

That's down the road, though. right now, pick one thing about yourself to change, and start practicing it.

And remember to get enough sleep.

Look at that. I can't tell if it's wordle, or imitation wordle made by hand. But it's front and center at our school lobby as "evidence of learning". I can't blame anyone for putting it there - it's certainly more visually interesting than what I gather as evidence, and that space is supposed to be visually interesting.

But I also see people advocating twitter for communication. Or Powerpoints¹ for final projects. Or any other number of things that seem to mostly look pretty, rather than cause a student to dig deep and struggle.

Our standards are so dense and thick that we are coerced into teaching them by rote - investigative lessons are mostly used to supplement the learning, rather than as the foundation of it.

The 1right3wrong tests we are judged on are yet another incentive eschew deep learning in favor of memorizing simple patterns. All of the pressures I see for how to teach seem to encourage flash over depth, and I'm not surprised that teaching at large is following along.

If things are to change, it needs to come from the motivations being given to us, and I for sure don't see that happening any time soon.

¹ Sure, Powerpoint can be effective. But I have a hard time believing that 5 slides with 18 words arranged as bullet points requires the same amount of thought and connection of concepts that a properly constructed 7 paragraph essay would. (back)

• This probably a direct result of my Dan style SBG: even though the grade is an aggregation of a number of different scores, I see it as so representative of a students skills that I am loathe to twitch it a little bit for fear of losing its fidelity. This is a huge change from where I was a couple of years ago.

• This attitude seems to reflect itself in my students. I can't remember the last time a student complained about the grade that I "gave" them. It's all about what grade they got.

• Out of all of my qualified students, only one took me up on the offer. The other dozen or so decided that they'd take what they deserved, and keep their threshold for next semester just a little bit lower. Rather than seeing this as a wasted effort, I see it as a validation and reinforcement of how I want them to see their efforts.

Even if they're smart enough to understand tetration without describing it terms of repeated lower order operations, I'm quite sure they're not smart enough to get me to understand it that way.

If anyone reads this blog anymore, I'll probably find that I've poked a very large noisy bear.

With no teeth or claws, thank god.

For all the handwringing about how a teacher could say that about a student, that's not what concerns me. I've heard similar in every faculty lunchroom I've been in. I've heard the same sorts of justifications for ineffective teaching bandied about at union meetings every time the topic of teacher evaluations comes up. She certainly gets enough commiseration in the comments (of her earlier posts, at least). And I wonder if these people all have completely different job descriptions than I do.

I watch the news (well, not all that much really). Or I read articles. Or I see other popular media opinions about teaching (coughWFScough). And they seem just as alien to what I do in a classroom every day. I don't even know where to start a dialog, because the presumptions about what teaching is are either based on fantasy, or ideas out of the middle ages.

I see teachers fresh out of their credential classes going nuts because they don't even have the basic tools to do their job, and have been thrown off the deep end to learn to swim. They're at the "Is there a worksheet for this I can use?" stage. I know they want to be at the "I know all the different misconceptions a student can get while learning this, and have a store of problems in my head that will illuminate those fallacies without actually doing any of the explaining myself" stage, but I'm sure I can't show them how to get there. After having had a whole load of professors and coaches whose alleged purpose was to facilitate that, I don't think anyone else has a surefire way of doing it either.

And on the flip side of the spectrum, I can walk into three different teachers' classrooms, who are by both subjective and objective measures better than I am, and see a range of styles that you couldn't blend with a Blendtec. That's nice, but I'm at a loss to describe to someone who doesn't do this job what it is that makes them effective, and those other teachers not so much.

How can I feel so clueless?

How can people who know nothing at all be so sure?¹

I've had this growing feeling for a while now that whatever professionalism there is in this job is a sham, and it's just turned into another resource to be mined and discarded, like the mortgage market was, or the energy market before that.

The only bright spot in my mind in all of this is that I feel none of this cynicism when I'm in the room with my kids. Then it's just me and them against the world, and every day we get just a little bit closer to kicking its ass. But as soon as they leave, the suspicion that I'm just a cog in a big giant sham creeps back in.

¹ I keep meaning to do a post about this paper. It's informed my teaching and my life on a number of different levels, so much so that I keep getting hung up because I can't do it justice. Read it yourself, maybe it'll hit your head like it did mine. (back)

The woodshop class made me a sign:

Ordinarily, in the past, I'd give them a point for effort, but this time around, I decided to make a bigger deal out of it.

I'm letting them (qualified students only) borrow a point or two to bring their grade up this semester. They need to make it up to me next semester, by getting a correspondingly higher score to match that grade.

I'll probably still waffle a bit, but it's looking like this is a good way to keep the effort those kids have been making as high as possible

Some days you couldn't pay me to quit teaching.

I'm think of, instead of my usual presentation, videoing my kids presenting the information. It's nervewracking, but I get my best things done by just jumping in and doing, and only worrying later about how much it might suck.

I've always got the old deck as backup, but there's a bit of pressure when the kids have been part of a project - they'll want to see the end result.

Be still my nerves.

As a teacher, this can be fatal. So I've had to learn how to fake it. I'm still disorganized, but I've found a couple of key things that make me look a lot more organized than I really am, and have a great bang for their buck.

Color code. RoYGBiV. 7 colors of the rainbow, in order. 2 of them don't show up in the 5packs from major product manufacturers, but you can still keep the other 5 in chromatic order: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet. In a 6 period day with 1 conference period, that makes one color per class.

It's a godsend during parent conferences, and I can ask the kid to get their folder and tell just from the color which period they're in.

It also keeps me from misplacing their assignments or important papers.

These are colored folders to match the color scheme above. To the front of each I have stapled a medium heavy duty transparency, just by the very edge. I can slide a seating chart under it, and it stays there by static electricity. I can then take attendance, points, and track behavior all with an overhead marker. and reset every day. New seating charts (generated randomly by Easy grade pro) are also easily replaceable. I make my seating charts to be viewed from the back of the room - this gets me to move away from the attention area, and it's also easier for the kids to read when I import then into my daily deck.

Inside each one I keep unreturned tests for students that were absent, or tests with postits for students who have yet to take them.

Finally, I have about a dozen of these bins, from Lakeshore. These two, however, are special. The left one has all of the leftover handouts from the previous day - If a student was absent I know where to easily find it without actually have a whole cataloging system. Likewise, the one on the right is my dumping ground for stuff that comes out of my mailbox. Invariably there was something important in there that someone asks me for 4 days later, this way I can always find it instead of in a pile on my desk.

I'm not one of them, but it wouldn't hurt to throw my opinions out there.

I've been thinking about this a bit, since I am now in my seventh year of teaching, and will have my seventh principal. Yep - I've had a different principal every year that I've taught. I've seen how they managed me, how they managed the school, and how well they accomplished what they were trying to do. The core of my philosophy on administrators came about while I was reading If You Don't Feed the Teachers They Eat the Students. What struck me, repeatedly, is that all of the advice for how administrators should treat their teachers echoed the same advice one would give a teacher on how to get the most out of their students. Soft skills for administrators are not that different from the soft skills for teachers.

1) Make it easy for the teachers to do their jobs. Get rid of extra paperwork¹. Make it easy for them to get materials they need. During PD, make sure the time is spent on something that will improve their craft. Give them tools to help with discipline (but don't try to do it for them). Teachers have a lot of stuff going on - the more they have to do that isn't directly related to student learning, the less effectively they'll be able to do their jobs.

2) Make your expectations clear. This goes on both a campus wide and individual level. If you need teachers to be involved in campus wide discipline, let them know how. If you expect them to pay attention during staff meetings, and not knit, grade, or browse the innertubes on their laptops, let them know. If there are more than 3 teachers on your campus doing something you didn't think they should be doing, you probably didn't do a good job of communicating your expectations.

3) Let your teachers make mistakes. My biggest learning has come from figuring out when I did something wrong, and how to do it right the next time around. My biggest growth has happened when I'm in an environment where I am comfortable taking risks, knowing that I can learn from both my successes and failures. My most stunted years have been those where I feel I need to stay close to the beaten path. As a caveat, make sure that when your teachers do fail, they become learning opportunities - a teacher who gets comfortable with failure is doomed.

4) Make sure to treat your teachers as individuals. If you have 4 teachers who continually come to school dressed inappropriately, don't announce it at large to the entire staff, deal with them individually. The people who need to hear it won't get the message with a large announcement, the people who hear it will just be annoyed that you're wasting their time. Find each teachers strengths, and build and reinforce those. Find their weaknesses, and help them overcome them.

¹ My current school has computerized attendance and grade submission. Every period I need to submit attendance online. 4 times a semester I need to enter grades. On top of this, I need to submit a (handwritten) attendance summary, and duplicate signed copies of each of those grade reports at the end of each semester, even though all of that information is readily available (to administrators, not necessarily teachers). I need to hand in a printed out certificate that I've completed my child abuse prevention training, even though they notify me that I've completed the training and just haven't handed in the paperwork. Why? It's a couple hours worth of work that is completely unnecessary. (back)

The technology/web aspect had plusses & minuses. It would be a lot more work intensive to get this collection of people together without the technology. Having a running list of people's comments that I could go back and review was useful - I can't write and listen at the same time. My sum total of notes for my many years of college is surely less than two pages. Being able to go back and review comments was a godsend. Not being able to review information Dan shared via audio sucked, but it did provide him an opportunity to bypass the chat noise to guide the lesson. I liked his use of the "type in your answer, but don't hit return" - it allowed for a much higher bandwidth of feedback.

I also realized I'm a crappy student. I didn't have paper & pencil ready. I totally missed the part where an agreement how much shorter the shovel was was arrived at, and ended up using a different number in my calculations. The not having paper & pencil handy killed me, because I started off trying to present my work using latex, and got frustrated with thinking and editing at the same time, and had wasted half the time before I started over. That's just my problem, though - not with the lesson. (Though perhaps it would have been nice to get a "what to expect" list before hand - I managed to get myself a dimdim account, but that was about it).

As Dan notes, the "what do you want to know" question yielded diverse responses. After he gave the intended question, and going back and looking at the clip, it seemed obvious. Perhaps just a simple change in the prompt from "What do you want to know" to "What were they talking about" would be enough to provide some focus.

I also got a bit hung up on the weight/volume question. I agree with Dan that weight is a more tangible thing, that our students have more experience with it, but it is also a lot more difficult to estimate, especially in large numbers. In retrospect, I think not specifying the units for the answer would halve been appropriately less helpful, and provided some fodder for discussion afterwards.

The actual problem was great - it provided several different equally reasonable approaches to solving. It'd be just about the right length of time for a full period. It has a completely unexpected answer (That might change if you used a much smaller difference for the shovels). It was very straightforward, but just challenging enough to make you want to question your answer when you were done. I'm kind of surprised that Dan hadn't worked it out beforehand, and I'd be interested to see how the lesson would have changed if he had.

I loved doing this, right in the middle of my Saturday afternoon, and look forward to being able to participate in one of these again. Way more fun than our usual after school PD.

Answers to some of Dan's questions:

I didn't care too much about seeing my costudents' guesses, but I'm odd that way. I know that when I collect guesses from my kids, it totally builds buy in, and I expect it would with this problem too.

If you use Apple Mail to read your mail, one of the filter actions is "run Applescript", and you could write up a small script to automatically FTP stuff to your site. Using php instead of html would allow you to automatically link to the uploaded files.

We've got a week and a half left, and the kids are restless. I didn't like the number line I bought this year, So I decided to have the kids help me out.

The templates were just a half sheet with the line and a tick mark across the top, along with a dashed rounded rectangle to provided them a guideline for where to draw.

I also printed up little slips with numbers for them to do, so I wouldn't end up with all 3s, 7s, and 13s. The range is from -20 to 20 not including 0¹.

It turns out that across all of my classes, I've got enough for just over 3 full sets. Count on a couple of absences, and I get a choice of 3 to chose from for each number.

Some of them were quite artistic, but because legibility is a prime requirement, I'm not sure all of these will make the final cut.

¹ I probably should have included it, but I think I want to keep the center printed, to emphasize the importance. (back)

And they did horrible at it come test time¹.

I don't have a complete answer to the word problems yet, but they knocked the graphing questions out of the park. The trick is that, on the test, you either get one graph and four choices of equations to match it to, or one equation and four graphs.

This is a series of worksheets, designed to take up just part of a class period every day for two weeks. I'd hand them out in the last 8 or so minutes of class, and make them tickets out. I'd also insist that students fill in the relevant information that let them distinguish between their choices.

The early worksheets are simple, requiring only happy/sad and y intercept to differentiate the choices. Later worksheets require more knowledge.

It turns out that the incremental requirements between these sheets was perfect for my students - everyone could get the first couple, and it introduced new ideas just quickly enough that they could adopt them and use them effectively.

The win was that they could use the knowledge from these worksheets not just to ace the test, but to quickly be able to predict what a graph for an equation would look like, or what they should expect when finding an equation for a graph.

¹ Our district does quarterly tests that tend to be pretty good predictors of how the kids will do on the CST. I find it useful to have that feedback, since I have no idea what the CST questions are, much less how the kids fail at them. (back)