The University of Chicago annually hosts the most comprehensive scavenger hunt you have ever seen, comprising eighteen pages, 269 items, and a 1,000 mile radius, and then they post the list.

I’m trying to figure out which of my known readers is gonna flip for these items like I do annually. Favorites culled from the first few pages while my last class took its final exam:

40. A mouse maze of revolving doors. Points will only be awarded if the mouse gets cheese. [27 points]
52. Get Obama’s haircut at Obama’s barbershop. [6 points]
67. Eighty-six 1986 pennies. [19.86 points]
125. A ray-gun with the big elliptical reflector and everything, only the ray is made of sound. Don’t hurt anyone, but if you’re firing at me, the beam should sound a lot louder to me than it does to the guy a few feet away. [13 points]

Okay I’ve gotta quit but, seriously, someone get these people a MacArthur grant.

See you next year, kids.

a/k/a So Beggars Can Be Choosers?

My work life has never seen so much upheaval. I have resigned my current district, effective the end of the school year, but until my fiancée finds her first post-grad job, I won’t know my next postal code, much less if the schools there have openings for lanky math teachers.

These circumstances, which include budget cuts and statewide layoffsPerhaps you heard about our little real estate whoopsie., would find 21-yo Dan beneath a desk clutching his knees but 25-yo Dan is somewhat enamored of the chaos. Moreover, due to an admixture of experience and arrogance, for the first time in my employment history, I will be interviewing my employers.

As much to reckon my own thoughts as to assist other job-seekers, in descending order of importance, my employment criteria are:

1. a faculty which sees student failure as clear indication of school failure. I want to work with people whose first reaction to below-average common assessment results is, “how can I learn from my colleagues?” not, “the assessment was invalid because I’m pretty sure I know a little something about teaching.”
2. a district-level professional development department. My small district has been so great in so many ways, but I have missed delirious fun like this for far too long.
3. block scheduling. I’m not sure I can go back to the rapid rhythm of hour-long classes.
4. a math department stocked with teachers young, old, and everywhere in between. The next youngest teacher in my current department is fifteen years my senior with two kids. I dig all my coworkers but, in many ways, we don’t relate.
5. a central math office to better connect with my coworkers.
6. autonomy in how I assess my students. Because of this, I mean.
7. a homeroom/advisory period, which my school is instating just as I resign.
8. veterans who step up and take the tough preps for new teachers. This isn’t self-serving. Lump me into the veterans and give me three preps, fine, but I want to work with people who treat new teachers better than an expendable, renewable commodity, who understand the most remedial classes need the best teachers.
9. a deep paper budget. Not because I’m huge on handouts, but because I assess constantly and write much of my own curriculum.
10. differentiated algebra, with placement determined by more than a middle school teacher’s impression of a student’s ability, a subjective measurement which shamefully shoehorned some brilliant students (however averse to homework) into my remedial math this year.
11. regular articulation with feeder middle schools, so we can tell them to teach fractions better so they can tell their feeder elementary schools to teach fractions better.
12. software for analyzing student achievement data.
13. a digital projector.
14. regular, district-sponsored time for department collaboration.
15. my own room.
16. a salsa bar in the cafeteria.
17. 1:1 laptops.

There are distractions, of course. I need a job where I live and die by the strength of my work. Teaching is not that job but it has too much yet to teach me to leave it. As long as I am a teacher, then, and until further notice, this is the list by which I judge all applicants.

What have I forgotten? What have I misprioritized?

a/k/a Well How Do You Spend May?

A freshman collapsed motionless outside my door. Then he got up, laughed, and flashed a signal at a friend who groaned and fell down likewise. They both ran to class.

Gawah?

My freshmen came into first period flashing the same signals and I asked them, “Gawah?” They told me this:

Instructions

1. You flash the birdman at anyone sworn into the game. If the flashee makes unblocked eye contact with the flasher, he has to [insert penalty here, which penalty, for my boys, was falling down].
   
2. You can make eye contact with the flasher so long as you throw up a block first.
   

I couldn’t help it. I asked them to swear me in.

Tactics, Takeaways, and Assorted Combat Notes

• As a general rule, if someone calls out “Hey, Meyer!” from across the classroom/lawn/courtyard/whatever, it’s best to throw up a block before you look.
• If you want someone to look at you from across the classroom/lawn/courtyard/whatever, don’t holler out the person’s name. Holler out, “POPSICLES!” or something equally nonsensical insteadLike “FIRE!” Wait. Not that..
• These kids are smart. They cameraphoned themselves flashing the birdman and then sent media messages to their targets. Digital natives!
• I flashed the birdman into PhotoBooth and loaded the picture into our math slides. Later I pressed a button on my remote and flashed ’em all at once!Okay, yeah, I know this is pedagogically terrible. This won’t become a habit, I promise.
• Word got out to the freshman class that I was sworn in. This created a tricky imbalance since a lot more of them know of me than I know of them. This imbalance became most evident as I planned lessons that afternoon in a coffee shop seven miles away where a kid I’d never seen before walked by my window seat, stared at me oddly, and then flashed the birdman!I blocked.

The Tally

Yeah, I guess I did okay.