In the spirit and namesake of an awesome Fortune Magazine feature story, I’m starting a series of posts that’ll run indefinitely. These are the tools that make my teaching easier, more effective, and more fun.
Dan Meyer
“Test data is the educator’s report card, and we need to be held accountable to it, if only as a small attempt to rectify the imbalance between how poor teaching affects life outcomes of the teacher, versus how it affects life outcomes of the student.”
Dude is so on the money.
This ratio runs through my head on an hourly basis. It rivals the first ratio in importance and, for me, is even harder to implement.
Nothing has kept me on the safer side of Mr. C’s Continuum to Burnout than that ratio there, which I try to keep as close to zero as possible.
The easiest way, of course, is never to become frustrated. But, psh, c’mon, right?
So here’s the general ethos you can pull from the ratio: if a student is intentionally trying piss me off, push my buttons, get me riled up, face steaming, temperature rising, she’s going to work really hard for that show.
Illustrative Anecdote #1:
When you find one great blog in the morning and another before tucking in, it doesn’t really matter what happened between breakfast and dinner, does it? Mr. C and I are just too close together on the learning curve — both a few years in, both having taught urban high school students — for me to ignore him. In a blogosphere full of English and History teachers blogging it’s great to find a few right-brain types reflecting and self-analyzing.
I killed a few months of his archives in just a few spins of the second hand, every post eliciting either an Oh-I-Went-Through-That or an Oh-I’m-Going-Through-That response. His continuum to burnout is just some heartbreakingly true stuff. Watch out for this guy.
I keep my blogroll slender. I have plenty more bloggers tucked into my feedreader but at this point there are only six I know I could recommend to a teacher stuck in quicksand then walk away with a smirk and the knowledge that they’d be alright.
The most recent is Dave Marain and his Math Notations. Dude’s experienced yet vital, provocative and eloquent. He’s fresh to the scene and his posts have flipped from open letters to graybeards like John Derbyshire to what I hope will be an ongoing series of math warmups. He hasn’t pinned himself down yet, which is great. If you’re stuck in quicksand, this is your guy.