Practical suggestions were few and far between when I started out. I was an English teacher, with an AP who spent hours describing the difference between an “aim” and an “instructional objective.” To this day, I haven’t the slightest notion what she was talking about. She also spent a good deal of time describing the trials and tribulations of her cooking projects, and other utterly useless information.

Neither she nor any teacher of education ever advised me on classroom control. The standing platitude was “A good lesson plan is the best way to control a class,” but I no longer believe that. I think a good lesson plan is the best thing to have after you control the class.

I also think a good lesson plan need not be written at all, as long as you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, neither the lesson plan nor the aim will be much help.

The best trick, and it’s not much of a trick at all, is frequent home contact. It’s true that not all parents will be helpful, but I’ve found most of them to be. When kids know reports of their classroom behavior will reach their homes, they tend to save the acting out for your lazier colleagues—the ones who find it too inconvenient to call. You are not being "mean" or petty--you're doing your job, and probably helping the kid. If you want to really make a point, make a dozen calls after the first day of class. Or do it the day before a week-long vacation.

Now you could certainly send that ill-mannered kid to the dean, to your AP, to the guidance counselor, or any number of places. But when you do that, you’re sending a clear message that you cannot deal with that kid—he or she is just too much for you. You’ve already lost.

And what is that dean going to do anyway? Lecture the child? Call the home? Why not do it yourself?

You need to be positive when you call. Politely introduce yourself and say this:

“I’m very concerned about _______________. ___________ is a very bright kid. That’s why I’m shocked at these grades: 50, 14, 0, 12, and 43 (or whatever). I’d really like __________ to pass the class, and I know you would too.”

I’ve yet to encounter the parent who says no, my kids are stupid, and I don’t want them to pass.

“Also, I’ve noticed that ___________ is a leader. For example, every time ___________ (describe objectionable behavior here) or says (quote exact words here—always immediately write objectionable statements) many other students want to do/say that too.”

"I'm also concerned because ________ was absent on (insert dates here) and late (insert dates and lengths here).

I certainly hope you will give _________ some good advice so ___________ can pass the class.”

If the kid’s parents speak a foreign language you don’t know, find someone else who also speaks it, and write down what you want that person to tell the parent.

If you’re lucky enough to have a phone in your room, next time you have a test, get on the phone in front of your class and call the homes of the kids who aren’t there. Express concern and ask where they are. If the kid is cutting, it will be a while before that happens again. If the kid is sick, thank the parent and wish for a speedy recovery.

The kids in your class will think twice about giving you a hard time.

Kids test you all the time. It’s hard not to lose your temper, but it’s a terrible loss for you if you do. When kids know you will call their homes, they will be far less likely to disrupt your class. The minutes you spend making calls are a very minor inconvenience compared to having a disruptive class.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a reasonable and supportive AP, God bless you. If not, like many teachers, you’ll just have to learn to take care of yourself. If you really like kids, if you really know your subject, and if you really want to teach, you’ll get the hang of it.

But make those phone calls. The longer you do it, the more kids will know it, and the fewer calls you’ll have to make.

Your AP, whether good, bad, or indifferent, will certainly appreciate having fewer discipline problems from you. More importantly, you might spend less time dealing with discipline problems, and more helping all those kids in your room.

Originally posted June 5, 2005

See also:

Ms. Cornelius with everything they forgot (or more likely, never knew about) at ed. school, and great advice from a new teacher at Syntactic Gymnastics. Here are a few tips from my pal Jose Vilson.

Everything Old Is New Again

Do you think your job is tough? Well it probably is. Maybe you’ve taken the wrong path.

If you’d only known the right people, you could have become a Tweed flunkie, perpetually dreaming up new ways to justify your six-figure salary. How would that be?

Well, you’d have to sit for hours and consider, for example, should you come up with a new idea? No, if you had any imagination, you’d probably never have gotten this job in the first place. Should you inspire teachers with your years of experience? No, that’s out of the question, what with your not once in your life having ever set foot in a public school, let alone worked in one.

Should you amuse them, at least? No, if you had any talent or sense of humor, why would your mother have had to get this job for you? What if you just gave them another few hours of long-winded convoluted trendy edu-speak with no value whatsoever? That usually works. Hmmmm...

Wait! You have a sudden flash of inspiration. You could just take the same old idea everyone’s been using for fifty years, give it a new name, and claim to have invented it. Then, when they do the same old thing they’ve been doing forever, you can tell the chancellor they’re using your idea. When standards go down, and test scores consequently go up, you can take credit for it!

Let’s see…you’ll need a big word here…OK, you can call it congruency, and amaze everyone by announcing that the do now and motivation have to be mostly related to the lesson. For example, you could caution teachers not to give too many algebraic equations as leads-up to lessons on Hamlet.

Wait—you’d better throw in another big word here—tell them to not even call it the do now and motivation—it’ll now be now the “anticipatory set.” That’s far less likely to be understood! You could explain it by saying “Teachers consciously stimulate the neural network so that the learner will be ready to make connections between prior experience and new learning.” Let them crawl under their beds and figure that out.

This has great potential. You can make up confusing handouts with arcane illustrations and spend hours at meetings explaining them to supervisors who are obliged to pretend they’re interested. Then, for the two extra days of talking you’ll have to do this August, you can rattle off the same thing to the teachers. Just sit them in groups and make them discuss it and give presentations on how they’ll use it. That’ll kill three or four hours right there.

So basically, the introduction to the lesson should be somewhat related to the rest of the lesson. How can you phrase that so no one will be precisely certain what you’re talking about, thus necessitating endless hours of clarifying discussion? What about this—“Most of the Teacher Actions are on a one-to-one match with the Teacher Objective.” That oughta do it.

Maybe you can make a video. That could kill a few hours, and you can show it at every meeting. Now you’ll need speakers no one exactly understands, to facilitate discussion groups who could try to figure out what the heck it’s about. By the time they report back, that’ll have killed two days right there.

Oh well, 11:30—time for another gala luncheon.

This job sure beats working.

Originally published November 24, 2005

Welcome back everyone. I know you're energized from your break and can't wait to get back to the classroom. I know I'm thrilled to be hear again...

You with your 2o,ooo dollar bonus!

That has nothing to do with how I feel. We had a wonderful year, the English Regents results were excellent, and while...

What about those forty-seven identical essays?

They were not identical.Some were four pages long, and others were five pages long. One was six pages long. They were consistently excellent. And bear in mind, they were all ESL students, many of whom had to use electronic dictionaries to understand the questions.

But they were word for word exactly the same. Even the misspellings were identical.

Really, Mr. Sandburg, who else but you would have even noticed?

Any competent teacher would have noticed. The State would have noticed.

But the State wasn't present. Really Mr. Sandburg, can't you focus on something positive? We're a C school, and next year, we will be a B school.

All you want is another 5 thousand bucks. We are a disgrace if we teach kids that plagiarism is acceptable.

Who says it's plagiarism? Our language teacher, Miss Dim, says that memorization is a very popular learning mode in her country. In fact, she had one of the boys from her country come up and reproduce the first two pages of the paper from memory. It was only then we decided to pass the students.

I can recite Anabel Lee right here and right now, but that doesn't make me Edgar Allen Poe.

That's not the point. These are kids. They have special needs. They require our understanding. Plus, Miss Wormwood claims she gave them that essay as a guide.

You got on the loudspeaker and said anyone whose cell phone rang would have their test voided. Yet here you are saying that 47 plagiarized papers, most doubtless copied from electronic dictionaries that store text, are acceptable.

That was my decision and I stand by it. Where's your school spirit, Mr. Sandburg? Didn't they do their "seat time?" Do you really want to imperil their graduation over a little misunderstanding like this? I regret we must cut this short so that Ms. Pewterschmidt can conduct "Right to Know."

Ms. Pewterschmidt?

Well, here you are, a New York City teacher going back to work tomorrow, and what can you do? You're facing two full days of fun and frolic, listening to speeches about what a great job the chancellor is doing. And it's true. Who else could've negotiated a contract that robs you of your Labor Day weekend for the sole purpose of listening to two full days of blah, blah, blah? Who else would've even thought of such a thing?

Aren't you better off sitting in a meeting than driving to Maine with your family, laying about on beaches, eating lobster, and getting very little of substance accomplished (I used to do that on Labor Day weekend)? After all, how would that improve test scores? Well, sure, two days of indoctrination may not improve test scores either, but at least they'll get you focused on whatever it is they want you to focus on.

What are you doing on this last golden day?

Enquiring minds want to know.

and you can find it right here.

In North Carolina, they'll give you a $10,000 bonus if you can teach Algebra 1. I did fairly well in Algebra, though I'm not sure all that mountain air would agree with me. In NY City, they're offering 5000 bucks to help you get settled if you're a new math teacher (If you're already in, too bad).

The retirement of thousands of baby boomer teachers coupled with the departure of younger teachers frustrated by the stress of working in low-performing schools is fueling a crisis in teacher turnover that is costing school districts substantial amounts of money as they scramble to fill their ranks for the fall term.

And it's not only in NC, but all over the country that people are having this problem. They can't seem to get all the highly qualified teachers they need. Historically, NYC has always known how to deal with such crises, and the rest of the country could easily follow suit.

1. Raise class sizes. If you have more kids in any given class, you'll need fewer teachers.

2. Forget all this "highly qualified" nonsense and make the gym teacher teach algebra. If the kids get out of hand, he's got a whistle.

3. Start programs to train teachers. Let them "earn while they learn."

4. Ask the state to lower teacher standards for your district. Tell them it's just for a while, and when a while passes, ask them to do it again.

5. Squeeze as many kids as possible into every corner of every building there is, and save a few bucks on school construction.

6. If teachers fail basic competency tests, or fail to meet requirements, keep them on anyway. Just make sure their salaries are capped at step 4, and it's like two for the price of one.

Do these things, and the whole supply and demand thing won't remotely affect you. And if anything does go wrong, just blame the teachers.

Well,we know it isn't class size. Class size in NYC is the highest in the area, and money dictates that it stay that way. Keep trotting out "reforms" and reduce size by fractions, and hope Class Size Matters goes away.

And we know it isn't overcrowding. My school's at 250% and growing, and how we can sustain quality is a mystery. Still, if we fail, we can move in academies and charters, and relegate half the staff to wander they system as ATR substitute teachers. We can replace them with eager newbies at half the salary who will work a few years, leave, and never collect a pension. Are they good teachers? What's the dif?

But public relations is another matter altogether. So when there's an online poll, Mr Klein's toadies send an email to DoE employees urging them to give good grades to the chancellor. They urge them to tell their friends.

Because in the education game, perception is 90% of the problem. So what if you're on the third reorganization? No one's gonna bother pointing out this means the first two didn't work.

Just give Uncle Joel an "A." Or be prepared to lose that cushy DoE office and find a real job.

Thanks to Norm

That's a problem. I hope you don't reside in East Meadow, New York, where they're fighting tooth and nail to keep a hearing-impaired student bring his service dog to school with him. In fact, they didn't even want the state to investigate their refusal.

Now we think of service dogs as the exclusive province of blind people, but I could imagine a hearing-impaired person having difficulties. First of all, schools run on bells, and that can be problematic if you don't hear them. Turning corners can be dangerous if you can't hear people coming around them.

If hearing impaired people feel they'll benefit from service dogs, who is East Meadow to tell them otherwise?

NY State has issued a list of 27 persistently dangerous schools, and 25 of them are in New York City. Mayor Bloomberg says he's going to continue doing what he's been doing.

If it weren't for those two competitors, he could've won the whole enchilada.

We do everything big in NYC. We've got the biggest classes, the most crowded hallways, and the most overcrowded schools. We've got over 90% of the persistently dangerous schools.

I've no doubt we'll move closer to 100%, given time and city politics as usual.

It's at The Red Pencil. Check it out.

UFT President Randi Weingarten is guestblogging at Eduwonk this week. Her first column was thoughtful, well-written and hard-hitting, directly refuting Chris Cerf. Ms. Weingarten feels the teacher voice is lost in the stampede toward improving test scores, and points out that teachers can actually do much more than that:

...teachers teach many important things in addition to skills and facts—complex problem solving, civility, aesthetic appreciation, moral values to name a few—and these are things that cannot be delivered in canned programs or assessed on a multiple choice, machine readable test. This evidence, along with standardized test results must be part of the mix in any responsible data-driven accountability system.

I couldn't agree more, and I'm very disappointed when my child's report card says approaching, meeting or exceeding standards--I'd prefer the whole A, B, C D thing.

Ms. Weingarten advocates increased teacher involvement as a real improvement for schools. I wonder, though, when exactly city teachers would do this. Since 2005, most high school teachers teach 5 periods, do hall patrol one period, and conduct tutoring sessions (a sixth class, if you ask me) four days a week. In overcrowded schools like mine, time is simply tacked onto each class, making them run as long as fifty minutes.

If teachers eat lunch one period, that leaves one period per day to prepare classes. Sometimes teachers work as subs that period, and get zero periods a day to prepare classes. Sure you can do it at home, but if you work one or two extra jobs, that's tough to manage.

So where do we find the time to do all this planning? Shall we extend the school day yet again? Shall we come in earlier in August? In July?

Unfortunately, many of the problems Ms. Weingarten mentions were enabled by mayoral control, which she supported. And the current regime at Tweed was plainly emboldened by the complete lack of opposition that met its third (third!) reorganization. Fortunately for them, Ms. Weingarten unilaterally disbanded a demonstration against it. This reversed a distinct downward spiral in PR for Mayor Mike.

Ms. Weingarten is eloquent, thoughtful, and quite intelligent. But if she wishes to be credible, she'll need to adjust her actions to match her words. For example, she might suggest we do planning in lieu of walking the halls, assisting the secretaries, dodging burgers in the lunchrooms, and teaching that sixth class (the one that isn't a class).

Don't panic. Actually it all happened in Indonesia. Two public school students not only had sex, but made a video of it.

This inspired the local government to propose virginity tests for female high school students.

"We can't accept this idea - it's unfair as the porno tape was just an isolated case," high school student Gita, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, was quoted as saying.

But then how will we know? And we need to know, don't we? I wonder who performs these tests. Do you think it should be the gym teachers? They're health ed. teachers too, of course.

Or maybe it should be the English teachers, as they'll be able to explain the test results better to parents.

Shouldn't we test the men too, just to be fair? Maybe we could make it a multiple choice test. Call me cynical, but I don't think the true-false thing would cut the mustard in this case.

There's a lot of controversy about what we should tell our children, and when we should tell our children about homosexuality. Should we discuss it in sex ed. classes? To me, it seems that not to do so would render a sex ed. class a lot less valuable.

I regularly hear kids shouting things like, "That's so gay," reflecting a mindset full of the same prejudices that plagued every ethnic group that's ever hit Ellis Island. Probably some of the kids who shout this are gay themselves, and eager to fit in. I think that's pathetic and we can do better.

When my daughter was about 5, she asked me, "What does gay mean?"

"Where did you hear that?" I asked, stalling for time. But she didn't know.

So I told her, very simply, what it meant. I certainly hope she won't be among those shouting, "That's so gay."

What have we to fear from giving our kids more information? Does anyone really think learning about homosexuality will make a difference in whether our kids are attracted to boys or girls? Aren't they going to make up their own minds, no matter what we think?

Why don't we just stop pretending ten percent of our population doesn't exist?

Why can't we get by without those handy stereotypical scapegoats?

What do you do when your daughter complains about her teacher? Well, if you work in the same school, you can attach a listening device to the teacher's chair. However, try not to get caught.

Anne M. Harvey, 44, of Flushing apologized to the fellow teacher and following her plea Thursday was sentenced to six months of probation and 75 hours of community service. Harvey also was fined $250.

So it looks like somewhere in Flushing, Michigan, a teacher will be wearing an orange jumpsuit and beautifying the environment. I certainly hope the folks at Tweed don't read this. They'll probably negotiate a new contract in which teachers pick up highway trash for one period.

I wonder if that's worse than hall patrol.

Thanks to Schoolgal.

Ex-education Mayor Rudy Giuliani has taken a strong stand for vouchers for private schools. Rudy, of course, has strong credentials in education. Under his tenure, every time the state raised aid to city schools, he reduced city aid by an equivalent amount (Mayor Mike was forced to abandon this practice in order to gain mayoral control).

It was also the reason a judge determined that the city could be compelled to pay a portion of the CFE lawsuit. Mayor Mike doggedly refused until the award was cut by 75%. He then declared the severely reduced award a great victory for the city since it entailed no mayoral oversight.

Rudy was also the architect of a plan to force welfare recipients to work in public schools. Rudy felt people chronically unable to find work were adequate adult role models for the city's 1.1 million schoolchildren. After all, his kids went to private school anyway, so what did he care?

Under Rudy's tenure, teachers were the lowest paid in the area, standards for hiring teachers were the lowest in the area, conditions were the worst in the area, and class sizes were the highest in the area. So Rudy knows a little about running public schools. He knows how to run them right into the ground.

When Rudy talks education, he hopes people think 9/11. Here in New York, everyone knew he was a bum on 9/10. Some of us have yet to change our opinions.

Well, here's one even I can barely believe.

A flamboyant Queens principal who has been hailed by Chancellor Joel Klein once used students' lunch money to help foot the bill for limos to the premiere of a school-produced rap video, investigators charged yesterday.

And it appears to be 30 thousand bucks' worth, too. He seems to have other charms as well:

Blake, who was once cited by Klein for improving school safety, punched, choked and threatened a 13-year-old student last year for making remarks about his son, who also attended IS 109, officials said.

Where in the world do they find these principals? It seems like they're falling like leaves off the trees. Could it be the pressures of having to perform for Mike and Joel are too much for ordinary humans? Could it be that the largest class sizes in the state, facilities more suited to prisons, and the lowest pay in the area for teachers are not precisely ideal reforms for a city seeking educational improvement?

And if it is indeed just a bunch of bad principals, when, if ever, will people start to question the judgment of those who select them?

Thanks to Schoolgal

Check out what Right-Wing Prof. has to say about high-stakes testing.

Wow, that's a lot of money. And Mayor Bloomberg is sending it to 50 low-performing middle schools. That's 100,000 per school, enough to hire two new teachers for each (as long as you keep them only one year).

He acted as the City Council released a report detailing problems in the city’s middle schools, including teacher retention difficulties and large class sizes, and issued a number of recommendations to address them. The council report noted that the percentage of eighth graders who perform at grade level is just 45.6 in math and just 41.8 percent in reading. Those were sharp drops from elementary school.

So Mayor Bloomberg appeared with a number of important city officials to report this incentive, including UFT President Randi Weingarten. There will be more advanced-level courses in these schools, as many as 100K each can buy, I suppose.

But the mayor shied away from adopting the most far-ranging changes recommended in the reports, like significantly reducing class sizes, creating a special middle school academy to train teachers about early adolescence, and removing police officers from city schools to create a more welcoming atmosphere.

Unfortunately, you can't significantly reduce class size at that price. And sadly, price is everything in Mayor Bloomberg's New York.

5 million bucks buys a lot of PR, though. While it goes a long way to sustain politicians, it will do far less for NYC's 1.1 million schoolkids. Had Mayor Bloomberg really wished to revolutionize education in this city, he wouldn't have reduced the CFE award by three-fourths through his monumental intransigence.

We're spending four-and-a-half million bucks a year to ensure that students like mine know all the new educational terms. That's for forty translators, and they've got every little nuance down, apparently:

In an earlier life, Xin Meng chased stories as a reporter for a Chinese-language newspaper in New York. Now he spends his days figuring out how to translate mysterious phrases like “empowerment school” and “English language learner” into Chinese.

I've no doubt he's great at it. Still, he should be translating phrases like, "Your child is studying in a half-classroom with no insulation, and therefore can hear every sound from the adjacent classroom." Or the ubiquitous, "We're dumping your kids into a trailer in back of the school because you don't speak English and we figure you won't complain." Or the ever-popular, "We're closing your kid's school and eliminating all the language-support programs that used to be in it. Good luck finding someplace else."

Maybe statements like that would incite the parents to get off their butts and demand better for their kids. Or maybe not.

Probably the best place to begin such a project would be with parents of American kids. Now there are a few that are off to a good start, but we've got a long way to go.

It's alive and well here in NYC, but there are limits. For example, if you're a high school principal, you're free to practice Santeria, or whatever religion you choose. But if you get caught using it to purge your school of negative energy, particularly if you've coerced staff members to contribute, well, perhaps you've created yourself a problem.

Maritza Tamayo, principal of the Unity Center for Urban Technologies, paid a woman named Gilda Fonte to lead several Santeria rituals at the Manhattan school during midwinter break in 2006, when students were not there, according to Richard Condon, the special commissioner of investigation for city schools. Tamayo coerced staff members to participate in and help pay for the cost of the ceremonies, investigators said.

Hmm...ya know it's one thing when the principal asks you to teach that music class, or to do a bulletin board, but paying for the cleansing ceremonies is a bit much. So it appears this principal will soon be seeking greener pastures.

One thing, though...maybe we oughta follow up and see how this chicken blood thing improves the school. Since Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have so firmly rejected the overly costly good teachers, small classes, and decent facilities route to good schools, isn't this worth a looksee?

Thanks to California Teacher Guy