We look to get better every day, and then we look to share our best practice with anyone who reads our blogs, comes to visit, comes to EduCon, etc…

Tom’s right — we need schools that work, that see themselves as incubators of ideas, etc.. .and we need more and more and more of them.

To be sure, I think having master teachers mentor rookies is important, but on its own merits, not to make the master teachers feel better about their career.

What a teacher needs is a well run school that gives them a real voice and role in the school as a whole. It’s the most you can give them, and if it isn’t enough, well, they aren’t bad people, but they just aren’t going to be long haul teachers.

Public education is organized (at the point of delivery) as a very flat, stable, formal, symmetric organization. In most schools there is a principal/VP and then ‘everybody else’. There might be a department head or two but generally these are found in high schools not in lower grades.

Here’s a short list of the various skillsets you might expect to find in a math teacher: Scriptwriter, Director, Entertainer, Mathematician, Curriculum Expert, Behavorial Expert,
Analyst, Clerk, Linguist, Cognitive Expert, Technology Expert, Custodian, Decorator. Now in an innovative tech company you would find formal and informal organizational structures that criss-cross the skillsets like silly string. In education what you find is boxes (classrooms) filled with ‘teachers’. You find recruitment of ‘math teacher’, ‘ela teacher’, etc. No skill distinctions are made in recruitment because every one is (unrealistically) expected to have and love the whole enchilada.

People evolve, and in innovative organizations, managers provide the stimulus and ecosystem to take advantage of the evolving skillsets and interests in order to leverage (as much as possible) every single person. The side effect of this managerial style is that people can move to, or create the kinds of jobs they love.

In public ed it’s just the box. If script writing is what floats your boat and you’re really good at it, there is no structure that enables you to leverage that work product across the organization. Each box sort of drifts into a comfort zone, if you’re so inclined, or a discomfort zone, if you’re an eagle.

TMAO is an eagle in a box!

I wish this was as simple as maybe it appears everyone who’s not currently residing in my head. Take the first sentence Dan quoted: “What gets me going is the pursuit of exponential student growth…” and complicate with the fact that what makes me want to go after that exponential student growth is my passion for these kids, this community, and its trajectory into American history. And that passion is underwritten by all the amazing kids I’ve met, their incredible families, the grit and guts I’ve watched kids pour into trying to get over the wall erected by all kinds of inequity. It’s never as simple as I-like-revising-my-lessons-more-than-I-like-teaching-them, even if I fail to accurately express that.

But, but, but… being in it for the progress IS being in it for the kids. Why do we reduce the commitment to youth as being confined to really digging how funny they are, how they’ve got this neat-o idiosyncracy? I don’t know.

The idea of moving schools and kinda, like, starting over has (perhaps bizarrely) never appealed to me at all. It feels like the guy who hits .407 for a season, and decides to start over again the next year hitting from the opposite side of the plate. That’s a challenge, sure, but why would you seek out that kind of challenge? Plus, I’ve got this thing where if I’m not teaching the poorest, darkest, most under-taught kids whose first-language is something other than English, I feel guilty and weak. Like, I feel bad about teaching in east San Jose sometimes, because I could probably find spots in Oakland and L.A. where shit is worse. Let’s not even talk about this too much…

For a particular group of educators – a group which I am not deifying – the returns on the usual classroom grind diminish more quickly than for others. I admit to some surprise that Tom and Bill, both refugees from the classroom, don’t identify more with this group.

If you don’t get up for the kids, then you should probably get out. If you want to help people become better teachers and develop ways for those teachers to get better, then you maybe should consider a doctorate in education and becoming a teacher of teachers?

It sounds like TMAO is someone who looks at what his lesson is going to be, tries to improve it to reach more of the kids, then is pleased when he sees the improvement. I’m not exactly sure what his problem is, because I’m pretty sure there will always be room for improvement! I just finished my first year (yay!) and have about 20,000 things I like to try next year. I think if I get all 20,000 done, I’ll have 15,000 more next year at this time. I mean, shouldn’t that be what we’re all doing? We’re never going to get 100% effective 100% of the time.

I know I struggle with this on some level year after year. How do I constantly re-invent myself? How do I keep from growing stale or jaded? How do I reconcile spending more time with other people’s kids than my own?

For TMAO, I guess the question I want answered is: Do you want to leave education, or do you want to leave your school? There are options in either case…

It’s pretty easy to blame the NCLB boogeyman for anything and everything but it’s worth noting in this case that it was NCLB’s accountability demands that offered TMAO the challenges which sustained him for these years.

Moreover, “All challenges are worthwhile challenges” disregards the not-inconsequential fact that different challenges satisfy differently.

eg. Any student who can’t multiply numbers or who feels abandoned by math represents a worthy challenge but, each successive year, those extra ten hours per week I spend on differentiated assessment and engaging instruction feel decreasingly satisfying.

I need a place to generate ideas, ideas which live only a few degrees of separation from students but which don’t require my implementation year after year.

Is this just a consultant? Some kind of journeyman teacher?

Just hijacked my own thread – my bad – this is and, uh, always has been, about TMAO.