… a teacher’s true effectiveness should not be linked to a teacher’s right to renew his or her license.

–the Washington Teachers’ Union, a letter to its members. [The Quick And The Ed]

I’m uninterested in resurrecting last month’s Million Comment March, or discussing She Who Must Not Be Named, or her policies, or their motivations, or their financiers (but if you absolutely must) I’m just curious what in the history of organized labor has led teachers’ unions to formally announce what amounts to a collective and colossal dereliction of duty.

For those who were around back when I wrote my anti-homework manifesto, lemme confess: I’m assigning homework now. Two problems every day – one tough, the other tougher – choose between them, same grade value for each.

Our block schedule inspired my not-quite-180° reversal, the fact that my kids go 48 hours between classes and need some kind of interim refresher. Kids are still cool ’cause I’m not indiscriminately assigning #1 – 30 (odd, of course). Parents still haven’t made their minds up about it.

Regardless: you win, homework.

[BTW: Hm. A bit of a reach here with this one. Which is to say, I’ve been overly prescriptive. Surely there are as many good ways to interact with students as there are students.]

I’ll receive kids in a week, which means it’s time to figure this out.

With more experience I have become more intimidated by the first day of school. I know what it implies, and it implies far worse than “no second chance to make a first impression,” a maxim best applied to amiable strangers.

Because your kids are not amiable strangers. The older they are, the more you must account for the carelessness of their past teachers. By high school, many students are only curious if you’re one of the teachers who likes them or one who hates themThe same goes for parents of students, to a lesser extent.. They aren’t inclined to consider the shades of gray between the two extremes or that, for many teachers, liking or hating students simply isn’t part of the equation.

Worse, many would prefer to find out you hate them. It is easier for these students to spend a year sparring with an antagonist than confronting the vastness of What They Don’t Know with an ally. These students will assess any curt correction or brusque manner as antagonism.

Clearly, you must construct your initial teaching profile carefully.

The Ideal Teacher Profile

In two sentences, here is the teacher profile that will do you the most good with the most students. Your students want:

a teacher who is capable of unkindness but who chooses instead to be kind, a teacher who is capable of severity but who chooses levity instead.

They don’t want a cruel teacher, obviously, but neither do students appreciate a teacher made of soft edges and kittens, someone wholly unfamiliar with the unkindness they must endure on a day-to-day basis.

Similarly, few students appreciate a morose bore, but neither do they appreciate a chuckling clown, someone who never quite graduated from a desk yet somehow made it to the lectern. They want someone who understands both masks.

You Have Three Seconds To Stop Hiccuping

The best way to find that median is to treat subjective silliness with as much dour objectivity as you possibly can, for as long as you possibly can, without cracking. Take it easy on the heavy stuff and go hard on the light stuff. Keep a loose grip on your rules but angle severe eyebrows at anyone who’d suggest The Jonas Brothers aren’t the best summer band of all time, etc.

This makes you slippery, like Teflon to kids who’d like to pin you down as a hater. It buys you time to show them you c*re. Whatever credibility four years teaching has endowed me, I’ll invest it in this: this is the ideal way to start the school year.

It isn’t a bad way to do the rest of the year either.

[BTW: I got one today. A kid came in clowning hard, looking to assert real fast what he was about, looking to find out what I was about. He has obviously rattled other teachers in the past.

I’m not saying I know how this is going to end but I know how I wasn’t going to let it begin. Out of twenty-four students in class, his was the only name I knew. Yet when I was running down the roster taking role, I asked his name just like any other. I wasn’t going to give him any celebrity. I wasn’t going to let him know his circus-act even registered.]

Eduwonkette is in top form today, first, taking the stuffing out of the hottest, gap-closingest new charter school in New York, one which manages to cherrypick students while still representing itself as “unscreened”:

To apply to be part of the first entering class at the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, students were asked to provide their most recent report card and two letters of recommendation, one from an 8th grade teacher and one from a guidance counselor, principal, or assistant principal.

Second, she calls down fire on movies like Freedom Writers and Lean on Me for promoting the idea that a successful teacher must mortgage her entire life, divorcing anything and everything unrelated to her job.

Not Unrelatedly

1. Classroom Distinctions, which takes Freedom Writers to task in several thousand fewer words than I did back when.
2. Teaching and Shortcuts, in which Chris Lehmann leaps off dy/av : 008 and wonders what teaching looks like as a sustainable career, particularly for us rookies. Few answers there. Mine would probably involve some salary multiplier but then I probably also need to realign my priorities. Sorry, self-sacrificing teacher buds.

Three observations – one substantive, one superficial, and one libelous – on Scott McLeod’s recent ranking of the edublogosphere, and the ensuing fracas.

Libelous

We all get this right? Whenever Scott feels his Technorati ranking slip a little, he issues another Technorati-based ranking of the edublogosphere and watches his inbound links explode. Here’s another link, bud, but I’m on to you.

Superficial

Eduwonkette notwithstanding, do any of the top fifty blog anonymously? Most feature an author bio, an author photo, and – bonus! – a unique voice.

This strikes me as the darkest dividing line between a well-written well-observed edublog and a well-written well-observed edublog on Scott’s list. Gotta pin it to a compelling voiceWhich is the challenge facing Educatorblog, barely a week old and already a sharp, prolific addition to our little set. Its readership will grow in spite of its indistinct title and anonymous author..

Substantive

I have seen two very right-minded disputes with Scott’s list (thrown into the comments for brevity) and two very murky ones which I’d like to clarify:

1. The bloggers at the top of the list have attained their position artificiallyFull disclosure: I’m on the list. You can decide if my midshelf ranking represents a conflict of interest..

   A representative response:

   The trouble is that it’s human nature to kind of hero-worship people. We all know who the ‘rock-star teachers’ are (to quote something that came my way by email recently…) and it would seem that, unfortunately, they run the show.

   I’m not saying that they necessarily try to run the show. It’s just that because of extra time (they’re no longer teaching, they’re consultants), motivation (they’re this close to effecting a long-awaited change) or energy they’re the ones who are read the most.

   This response suggests an edublogosphere stocked with idiots, each one duped of their subscriptions and trackbacks by a cabal of energetic consultants. Somehow, post after post, these rubes never wise up.

   A less sinister, less unhinged explanation would note these bloggers’ consistent, prolific, and quality writing, their interesting ideas, artfully written – in short, the objective quality of their output.

2. The quality of a blog’s output is entirely subjective.

   Truly, it’s impossible to account for taste, and in any other corner of the blogosphere, I wouldn’t even bother with this one. But these are educators, and I worry when educators dismiss even broad objective standards of quality for blogging / podcasting / vodcasting / whatever, or when educators confuse interesting ideas, artful writing, and a compelling voice for extra time, motivation, and energy.

   This dismissive stance squanders one of the Internet’s coolest promises for our students:

   You are your output. You can rise, fall, and affect change solely on the strength of what you submit to a blog, irrespective of age, gender, race, status, or disabilityI mean, how would these critics rationalize the success of Students 2.0, a group of bloggers who aren’t first-movers, consultants, or otherwise endowed with vast stores of free time, who are, instead, just good writers with interesting ideas?.

   How can we promote the blogosphere’s meritocracy to our students – the fact that no one knows you’re a high school freshman on the Internet, that your ideas can go viral just as fast as anyone’s – but deny it in our own blogging?