Though I’ve maintained an entirely lax seating policy this year, I told them I was bored with the configuration, which had been constant since August. I told them to pack up, go outside, and wait near the door.
I walked outside and tossed out some mental arithmetic:
What’s 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1?
What’s 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1?
How many quarters are in $7.50?
What is the only state that grows coffee?
As students tossed hands up and answered questions correctly, I let them grab a friend and pick any seat inside.
As far as meaningful assessment goes, I doubt Bloom would approve. As far as seating selection goes, it’s my favorite.
[meekly pickpocketing my high school math teacher, Sid Bishop]
That was the opener. A member of our faculty began an address to the freshman class with that line the other day. A few kids held out and s/he said it again.
“When I talk, you listen.”
I imagine a lot of folks โ especially those who promote the equivalence of teacher and learner, who promote a perfectly democratic discourse โ will chafe at the authoritarianism of it all. Others โ Andrew Keen disciples mostly โ won’t mind.
Personally, I was unoffended. I don’t have much interest in a classroom (or society) where every voice carries equal weight, where experience and education merit no preference. That goes double in a gymnasium full of freshmen.
But I become particular and somewhat critical in the moments immediately after you’ve exploited your authority. In the five seconds after you’ve caught the attention of every freshman at your school (like the Labrador finally catching the car) you either lose it or keep it.
You lose it by leading with filler, by continuing, “Your teachers have talked a few things over in our meetings, which we have every month, and we’ve decided that certain issues face our campus, some which are more pressing than others, etc., etc.”
And they’re gone. Just gone.
If you want to keep their attention, to earn it, you let that silence sit for what screenwriters call a “beat,” essentially the length of one thought, and then you say, “Look, we need you in class, on time. You may not like this but here’s how we’re going to fix the tardy situation around here.”
One is filler. The other is content.
One is signal. The other is noise.
One abuses the strange power dynamic between teachers and students. The other respects it.
Practically Speaking:
Cut the first chapter of your book.
Lose the first paragraph of your essay.
Don’t introduce yourself at your conference presentation.
Open with a question or at least a big statement.
Don’t follow a joke with leaden, nervous laughter.
Personally Speaking:
In my classroom, if we’re in a work session and I need to talk to the class, to steer ’em somewhere new, I head to one corner of the whiteboard, my only serious place in the classroom, and say, “I need you back here in 5 … in 4 … in 3 …If kids are still talking after the countdown, I don’t give ’em any dirty looks or anything, I just write their names down and keep ’em after class for a minute.,” and whenever they quiet down I pause for only that beat and I immediately โ no filler โ offer them something meaty, succinct, and worth their while.
“If you fell out of an airplane, how long would it take you to hit ground?”
You can throw your back out, as I did for two yearsSneaking suspicion: the seed of all lousy classroom management is fear., imposing comprehensive rules and escalating consequences all to keep your students’ attention or you can just give them something worth listening to.
Now Scott’s just showing off. He’s taking whatever hours he can spare from his position as an administrator, investing them back in the classroom, and logging the result. ¶ If you’ll all just go ahead and toss Scott into your feed reader, I won’t have to repost everything he writes here. Thanks.
“‘Don’t Smile Until Christmas’ and Other Teaching Myths”
Presenter
Gary Tsuruda. Retired Teacher, Palo Alto USD. Finalist, Presidential Teaching Award for Mathematics and Science.
Narrative
Didn’t do much for me but from the standpoint of a conference organizer it was probably perfectly selected.
We were all piled into a middle school auditorium โ beginners, veterans, math degrees, multiple-subject credentials, high school, elementary โ so Tsuruda had to pitch the talk straight down the middle, no curve whatsoever.
The myths cited, then, were either obvious (turns out you can smile before Christmas), pandering (turns out teachers don’t have it easy), or plainly false (turns out creativity and NCLB are mutually exclusive).
Lots of cheering, lots of quotes from historical/literary figures (I probably should’ve recognized) affirming the nobility and self-sacrifice of the teacher, standing ovation at the end, all kinda highlighting what, as of this posting, no longer surprises me: I just don’t get these people.
Presentation Notes
PowerPoint. (The giveaways, incidentally, are: white drop shadows, a limited color palette, a general flatness.) I’m really surprised by a particular innovation I’ve seen in two presentations here:
If the presenter has three bullet points (for example) she makes three identical slides but sets the text color of each bullet point that doesn’t matter to the background color leaving only a drop-shadow “ghost.” The result pulls your eyes to the current bullet point without fully erasing the rest.
Homeless
I addressed this idea that constraints are the enemy of creativity back when the University of Chicago asked its applicants for four static PowerPoint slides. To a vast extent, the opposite is true.
While Tsuruda spoke of our saintliness for accepting low pay, one woman in front of me whispered to another, “well we want to make sure people go into teaching for the right reasons.”
I really don’t have words to describe how weird that attitude makes me feel. It gives me grounds to make a guarantee, though:
If you expect people to get into teaching sacrificially, to begin and persist in this job for the passion and the joy of working with students, you will get workers who resent administrator observations, who eschew professional standards, who cling to tenure, and who promote this job as art.
You won’t get teachers who embrace this job as a measurable, reproducible science, who believe that a teacher’s worth correlates strongly to her students’ achievement, or who recommend promoting and demoting teachers accordingly.
America: you’ve gotta decide. If you want workers from category #2 (like me โ there, I said it) you’ll have to give them a reason to begin, persist, and innovate in teaching beyond the joy of the job. If you want workers from category #1, it doesn’t seem sporting at all to treat them like they work in category #2.
“Tell Me Something That is Going to Work: How To Motivate Students!”
Presenter
Timothy Kanold. President, National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics.
Narrative
I relaxed my stance on exclamation points in presentation titles and was pleasantly rewarded with a maximum of sober introspection and a minimum of canned inspiration.
Kanold, if nothing else, asked a battery of good, tough questions, starting with:
What is your area of no-talent? (A: Running.)
When did you decide it was an area of no-talent? (A: High school, mile three of a nineteen mile run with the cross country team)
And then the big crossover:
Can all kids learn math?
Whose responsibility is it to be motivated?
We discussed these questions with seatmates and there was a lot of discomfort throughout both, a vast difference between what people wanted to say and what they felt comfortable saying.
I asked TMAO’s miserable icebreaker, “What percentage of the responsibility for student achievement rests on the teacher?” From the guy on my left and the girl on my right came the same response: 50%.
50% in spite of our advantages in age, education, confidence, and salary. I don’t think I have much use for that figure.
Kanold talked about how easy motivation is for math teachers. Kids are pressed into it. Math is required for graduation. He noted, however, that graduation is a lousy stick to get kids motivated since a lot of kids just don’t care about graduation.
His recommended motivational strategies:
meaning and context sparks motivation, connecting these things as much as possible to their experience.
assign work that is worthy of their effort, as in, not #1 – 50 (odd).
communication and engagement reign supreme
congruent and comprehensive assessment, emphasizing a “menu” style assessment which sounded somewhat familiar.
He asked us, finally, to agree or disagree with three outlooks on student achievement:
What we’re doing here is important.
You can do it.
I’m not going to give up on you โ even if you give up on yourself.
I want to work in a school where those affirm those statements are promoted and those who waver and demure are marginalized so they can do no more harm.
Presentation Notes
PowerPoint. Low word count, especially compared to later presenters. Early projector malfunctions attest to the need for good preparation and backup plans.
Homeless
“Think like an elective.”
“Make a place that’s so compelling I want to be here.”