At first, your students don’t know anything because you teach poorly, and you know this. Then, you become happily aware that some students are learning. You know that other students still aren’t, but you are pedagogically nearsighted and can make only blurry distinctions between the two camps. Your teaching improves and the ranks of the Is Learning camp swells and you know the members of the Isn’t Learning camp by name. You develop better methods of tracking achievement and you know exactly what the students who aren’t learning haven’t learned. Moreover, as you teach, you begin to anticipate the material that will confuse these students. You realize that your intervention can effectively transfer a student from one camp to the other. At a certain point, the technical challenges to increasing student achievement disappear, but the moral challenge remains. Will you do it? Every day, every hour, every student for 180 days, will you do it?

Man, this economy keeps getting worse. Now I have to rewrite last year’s warm-up questions:

Most Santa Cruz houses are more expensive now than they were a decade ago. A $450,000 house with three bedrooms, a pool, and a monkey butler, increased to $1,000,000. What was its percent increase?

This one is actually pretty easy to adjust.

Kilian splices together his own highlight reel, going a long way to explain how someone managed such sui generis blogging from a generic Blogger template.

• Kilian Betlach, Teaching in the 408, Best Teacher Blog.

Nominated posthumously, unfortunately. At one point I thought his new employers at Ed Trust would deploy him as their answer to Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey but that seems overly hopeful now. Even if he never puts down another word at his blog, though, it will still remain best-in-class for new teacher biography, for an anthropological study of a particularly high-functioning kind of educator, and, of course, for good and honest basketball coaching.

Nothing brings out the worst, most overblown rhetoric in our little sphere than the Edublog AwardsUnless it’s one of Scott’s blog rankings. but, given my hypothesis that these awards function as reference directories for newcomers, I can’t help but play along. No one’s writing deserves the audience more than TMAO’s and if y’all don’t pull through with the votes, I’ll proceed straight to my backup plan where I bind his collected blog output in hard copy and distribute it to every new teacher I meet.

Aside: nominations require a blog this year, which is an interesting decision on the part of Josie, James, et al.

The narrative arc of my five years teaching only became apparent to me while writing my last post:

I won’t allow a fourteen year-old to choose to fail.

I only mention such a horribly self-aggrandizing motto because I adopted it only recently, and only after three or four years of committed heel-dragging.

Until recently, and only for one example, if a student was suspended for fighting or for possession or for substance abuse, I would halfheartedly assign some take-home work, taking their suspension as indication that this student was not school material. Upon that student’s return, I would remediate her missing instruction halfheartedly, assuming (often correctly) that another suspension was in the offing, and watch as she fell farther and farther behind, reminding myself self-righteously that the personal freedom we cherish in America sometimes means the freedom to fail.

This attitude was oftentimes subconscious, but somewhere sub-rosa I certainly saw Algebra the way basketball coaches see wind-sprints on the first day of practice: as a device to identify and eliminate the weak rather than a device for empowering the weak.

My professional transformation has been ugly and painful, honestly, mirroring my political transformation exactly, requiring me to pick away the scabs of my socially conservative youth and rid myself of this idea that public schools are ideally a meritocracy where the kids who want success the most will seek me and my instruction out, wherever I am, and if they don’t, then that’s the downside of personal freedom, a concept which I now realize is irresponsibly applied to high school freshmen who (eg.) don’t live with their parents.

This motto asks me to individualize my relationship and my instruction to every student. I believe this motto is essential to good teaching (and I acknowledge humbly that many people have come to this place before me) and I have to point out, in conclusion, that this motto is virtually impossible to apply to 100 students across five classes over an entire career. Good teaching is impossible teaching.