Your own husbands and wives don’t know you as well as Jeff knows me:
You’re just shaking the bee’s nest while covered in powdered sugar, a big ol’ grin on your face and your buddy taping the whole thing for some sort of amateur Jackass production.
That’s basically it.
Let’s say your New York City charter school has resolved to pay every teacher a base salary of $125,000. You’re about to drown in applicants. How do you sort through them?
If you’re founder/principal Zeke Vanderhoek:
The school’s teachers will be selected through a rigorous application process outlined on its Web site, www.tepcharter.org, and run by Mr. Vanderhoek. There will be telephone and in-person interviews, and applicants will have to submit multiple forms of evidence attesting to their students’ achievement and their own prowess; only those scoring at the 90th percentile in the verbal section of the GRE, GMAT or similar tests need apply. The process will culminate in three live teaching auditions.
Waitaminit … expertise verified by student achievement?!
Who in the hell does this stuffed suit Vanderhoek think he is, telling me my worth as a teacher is in any way related to what my kids know? If they don’t learn, that’s on them, their parents maybe too, but not me.
I mean, look, man, I’m an artist and you can’t assess art with numbers. Unless they’re the six numbers you’re fixin’ to write on my check.
I mean, it’s almost like he’s trying to turn teaching into a profession.
My latest post is up at Authentic Education, responding to the prompt, “Should homework be banned?” I respond (unsurprisingly) along the lines of, “No, but …. ”
So ban the homework assigned because a teacher couldn’t manage her class (“Okay … okay, everyone … listen up … take the rest of this home for homework.”) or because a teacher couldn’t make something meaningful out of the full class period (” … tell you what, I’ll let you start early on tonight’s homework.”).
Holler back over there.
[Update: Dana Huff throws down the gauntlet and Alfie Kohn (!) picks it up.]
Been getting a little heavy around here with classroom management, so let’s toss out something inconsequential:
I realize this is totally soft math but I’ll absolutely defend the value of having these kids reframe their daily lives in mathematical terms. No one had considered fruit like this until today.
And now back to your regularly scheduled handwringing.
2011 Aug 26: This is Dan from the future. It’s bizarre coming back to these posts where I didn’t realize I was teaching math with things like the tasty / easy graph. At this point, I’m still filing the things that will eventually define my career under a “Miscellaneous” category. I mean, look at that. The title of this post is “Anyway.” Like the tasty / easy graph isn’t one of the best introductions to the Cartesian plane ever. This is such a weird time capsule. Anyway. Here’s JL with some great comments on classroom implementation:
We started by graphing fruit on a coordinate plane where the y-axis ranges from “Tasty” to “Un-tasty” and the x-axis ranges from “easy to eat” to “difficult to eat.” Students were given 3 sticky notes and told to write a different fruit on each one. Then they went up and graphed them. They were asked to defend their ordered pair. If a student put Pineapple on the “easy to eat” side, there was an uproar of argument. Kids got really, REALLY into it.
Okay, so what I’m trying to say is that the textual study of classroom management failed me in ed school. Even grails like The First Days Of School, Every Minute Counts, etc., didn’t do me anywhere near as good as butchering a period and slumping back for an autopsy with my mentor.
I can’t offer every new teacher that experience but I think I can offer them something close, something, I’m almost certain, better than the usual detached ed-school take on classroom management.
I want to insert teachers into a sequence of carefully engineered classroom management disasters – which we’ll call … um … “episodes” for right now – each one focusing on a distinct, typical conflict, each one increasing in complexity, and each one so virtual you can just walk away from the disaster with a pocketful of answers at the end.
In other words, I want you to own your management solutions rather than buy mine. My book of maxims is easily dismissed and finitely applicable to your classroom. But if I put you and your new teacher buddies into a virtual classroom management thicket (ideally alongside a mentor) and say, “hack your way out of it,” each of you will construct your own solutions, each of which will look slightly different from the others.
Moreover, as with any line of inquiry that begins, “What went wrong here?” you’ll find solutions to problems I included unwittingly, which is awesome. Moreover, you can insert yourself into the same situation a year later and watch your entire solution set change. Are these outcomes even possible with a book of prescriptive advice?
Obviously I’m talking about television