That wacky DOE is at it again. I just got an email from Dennis Walcott saying that emergency workers should report at 8 AM tomorrow. What are emergency workers? Well, emergency workers are pretty much any city employee who volunteered to be one. I got 4 or 5 calls and several emails asking me to be one.

However, at the bottom of the message was this:

At this time, we expect City government and schools to open on Monday. 

So not only are those teachers who volunteered to help expected to do so--they're also expected to report to their regular jobs. That way, apparently, they can be at two places at once. Pretty impressive feat for people denied the raises all other city workers got between 2008 and 2010.

But that's not the only thing these visionary leaders have planned. If people report to these shelters, they will be there along schools in session. I suppose having dozens, if not hundreds, of strangers milling about while children are supposed to be studying does not pose a potential problem for Mayor Bloomberg. After all, his kid didn't attend a public school anyway, so why should he care?

The other thing that has not crossed Mayor Bloomberg's mind is the unpredictable nature of nature itself. What if everything is fine Monday morning, but the storm picks up later in the day? You know, when the kids are walking or taking public transport home? That, of course assumes there will even be public transport. Does Bloomberg think it's a good idea for students to use their own schools as shelters, grouped with their school friends rather than their families?

Why not? Neither his kids, nor the kids of his rich pals attend public schools.

All agency employees are requested, beginning after 11 p.m. on Sunday night, or on Monday morning, to watch local news, or check nyc.gov or the agency's web site, for the latest information before leaving for work on Monday. 

That's very considerate. As I live in a flood-prone area, I don't even think I'll be home tonight. I don't know whether I'll have electricity, or internet, or the latest information. But like all of New Yorkers, even if I did, I wouldn't be able to plan for what could very well be the most significant storm of our lifetimes.

And neither will the children Mayor Bloomberg puts "first," or any of their families.

Update: MTA will begin shutting down at 7 PM tonight, and will be completely shut down by 3 AM this morning. 

UPDATE: City schools CLOSED tomorrow!

Yesterday a girl in my class got a 44 on my test. It freaked me out a little, because the test was fairly easy. In fact, it was a multiple choice test, which I don't usually give, and she filled in eight "E" answers, though the options were only A, B, C, and D.

This is the third test I've given this year. She was absent for the first one, and was out for three days in a row. In the rush of beginning the year, I failed to follow up on that. But the second time she missed a test, I got a guidance counselor who spoke her language to call home. Since then, she's been early for class every day and hasn't missed a single moment.

However, I have 34 kids in that class, and being the last one in, she's been happily seated in the back. I walk around and look at the work kids do, and have been correcting her a little more than I should be at this point. My class is level 2 ESL, meaning near-beginners, and I was thinking of moving her down to level one. But when we checked, we found she'd been here for three years. It's remarkable to be a teenager in a country for three years without acquiring the language. Usually it's either someone who was not educated in L1, or someone who was dragged to the US kicking and screaming. Sometimes it's both.

I found she was in an AP's class, and the AP also spoke her language, so I went in and asked how she was doing in his class. She seemed to be doing OK, but he teaches in her native language. He called her in and asked why she marked so many "E" answers on a multiple choice test.

"I was indicating none of the above," she responded, serenely.

I started banging my head against the wall.

"Look," said the AP. "You're giving Mr. Educator a heart attack."

"That's nothing," she replied. "He has heart attacks all the time."

She's right, of course. I am melodramatic from time to time. But the fact that she was so quick to observe that shows me she has a little sense of humor, or irony, or something. I wonder how she manages to keep such a placid demeanor while she's doing so poorly in a basic English class. As I walked her back to class I asked her what she thought she could do here without English. Was she planning a career in dishwashing? No, she was not. How does she maintain that Zenlike composure in the face of such appalling results?

"Maybe she knows something you don't know," commented my supervisor. She certainly must. I wonder what on earth it is.

Article 7, Q, 6 of the UFT Contract reads thusly:

Faculty conference agendas shall be set in consultation with the UFT chapter committee.

When was the last time anyone asked you what you wanted to discuss in a faculty conference? I've been on several chapter committees, and only very rarely did this topic even come up. So is it our fault if we sit through meetings on the vicissitudes of what Good Teaching is this week...

Remember, you must have a motivation. Kids will not do any work unless there is something sexy attached to the assignment. But for goodness sake, don't mention sex, and don't refer to it, even obliquely, or the guys in suits will be here and you'll be up on charges.

...or why students should not be late?

Remember, if they come in late, tell them lateness is very bad. Make sure they know it will affect their grade. Fail them for being late, and tell them that's why you failed them. But for goodness sake, make sure they aren't late, and pass them all no matter what!

So how do these decisions get made? Does the principal sit in his office, thinking about the Next Big Thing in education and how he can get those crazy teachers on board with it? I once had a principal who did nothing but that. He got all excited about every new thing that came down the pike, and somehow his enthusiasm was less than contagious.

Of course, there are always people who will get excited about that sort of thing. And there are a great deal of people who will never object to anything. I suppose that sort of person could become a supervisor by making the right move at the right time. I've even met chapter leaders who aspire to be administrators, and I can only suppose they're the worst possible chapter leaders anyone could have. It's hard to see how someone trying to move up in administration could do a good job representing the staff.

Do you get any say in faculty conferences? Would it make a difference if you did? Or are they a lost cause, another reason to be pointlessly lectured on why kids should not be late every month, every year, every decade, until you retire and take those rumba lessons you've always dreamed of?

For several weeks now, I've been writing about the new program my school has been using to keep track of student data. It's called Skedula, and it's largely unpopular in my building. It just seems like you always need to do three things instead of one. Furthermore, though most of my colleagues use ipads, there is no ipad app. The rep came to our school several weeks ago, and assured us we'd have one in two weeks. Now I hear the real roll out date is sometime in December.

If that's the case, Skedula ought to refund half of whatever they charged us. If they knew their program wouldn't serve our needs and sold it to us based on an app that wasn't even out yet, shame on them.

But there are other questions I have. For one, I'm hearing schools Mayor Bloombucks tried to close were required to use Skedula. Perhaps this program was seen as having the ability to make ESL students speak English and special ed. students overcome any and all disabilities. Or perhaps someone thought it was a good idea for its parent company, Datacation, to make money. I mean, sure, it's not Eva Moskowitz, but it's always important for The Right People to make money. Of course I'm not talking about educators, the only city employees Mayor Bloomberg did not see fit to give an 8% raise for the 2008-2010 bargaining round.

Another thing I wonder, and this appears verified by Skedula itself, is how on earth they got access to STARS, the DOE database usually open only to administrators. I know for a fact that other programs do not have this access. At my school, in order to use Daedalus, administrators constantly had to do updates within the building. How did Skedula get an automatic connection?

So, with favored treatment, and a seriously flawed system, one wonders whether Skedula is the Next Big Thing. For example, I've read that ARIS, the 80-million dollar boondoggle our financial wizard of a mayor is about to trash in favor of a yet-undetermined state system. Is Skedula as crappy as ARIS? So far, I'd say yes. And were it to be imposed statewide, like an epidemic, I've no doubt Andrew Cuomo, the student lobbyist, and his merry band of hedge fund magnates/ education experts could endeavor to make it even worse.

Because when it comes to pointless nonsense, no one takes a back seat to Cuomo and Bloomberg. That's a good thing, because given their massive egos, there won't be room in the back seat of the largest, ugliest Hummer limo in the great state of New York.

Joseph Del Grosso, head of the Newark Teachers Union, is endorsing a new contract that entails merit pay, value-added measures, and which is "secretive about financial details," though we know it hinges on $100 mill in Facebook bucks, which we don't know to be renewable.

Del Grosso is portrayed in the article as someone who's moved from a young firebrand to someone with a completely different position-- heroic by the writer's highly uninformed point of view, but questionable at best by mine. More disturbing, perhaps, is this quote:

“The teachers who come in early and stay late, and take the job seriously, are offended by the teachers who don’t,” he says. “They are the silent majority, and I think they will overwhelmingly vote for a contract that involves them in their own destiny.”

Can you imagine the things these offended teachers must be saying?

That damn Ms. Smith, always going home to look after her baby!

I hate Mr. White. Who the hell does he think he is, running to his second job at the carwash at 2:30 every day?

I'm a teacher who comes in early and stays late, but I certainly don't go around telling anyone else to do that. For me, it's a matter of convenience, avoiding traffic, and doing things that are more efficiently done on school grounds. Were I an administrator, I would not presume to judge a teacher by hours in building, quantity, but rather by what's accomplished in the classroom, quality.

It's quite disturbing to see a union head suggest that teachers ought to work for free, and that whether or not they choose to do so is indicative of the quality of their work. It's further disturbing to see Nixon invoked in his use of the term "silent majority." This was a rationale used by a criminal to support clearly failed policies.

Also disturbing is the possibility that teacher pay will be linked to whether or not they are "effective," and that their degree of effectiveness will be determined by something as inane as value-added, which has proven disastrous in other venues, most recently Florida. The article writer, apparently unaware of the difference between reporting and editorializing, offers this tidbit:

Workers in the private sector take it for granted that their performance will affect their pay, and that if they screw up badly, they will be fired. Teachers, like many other public employees, have been protected against that harsh, real-world stuff.

This, of course, assumes that teachers are never fired, an utter fallacy. It also fails to consider that value-added has no validity whatsoever. There is a lot of talk about teachers having "a seat at the table," but I heard that talk before the UFT got involved with Bill Gates' MET project, notions of which have been imposed on most of the country well before there was sufficient evidence to do so.

This contract has the "blessing of Gov. Chris Christie." If anyone reading this thinks Christie has the interests of teachers, students, or parents at heart, I can give you a very good price on a bridge in Brooklyn.

Yesterday I had a big problem contacting a student's home. A girl walked in 20 minutes late, like she owned the place, after having arrived just before the ending bell rang two days ago. She had a big smile, looking as though she was expecting to win a prize. At least two times I caught her fussing with makeup rather than paying attention. This was fairly easy for her to do as the only seat in my 34-person class was one in the back.

The girl had written a contact number on the card I gave her, but there was another one on Skedula. I went up to her and asked whether the number she gave me was her mom's number. She assured me it was. But it wasn't. And neither was the number on Skedula.

Personally, I hate when kids come late to my class. My feeling is this--if I have to be on time, so do they. So I went to her guidance counselor, hoping she might have the magic number to send this girl's behavior home with her. The counselor remembered seeing it somewhere, and opened up our old program Daedalus, where she found a note someone had written with the correct phone number.

I struggled on my iPad to make a similar note in Skedula. I clicked and prodded. After several false starts, I finally found the anecdotal, which, by default, is academic negative. I tried to change it, but it wasn't all that responsive. Is it negative to leave a current phone number? Well, it would be today. Unfortunately, no matter how many times I touched the window, my iPad keyboard would not appear. So that particular mission failed.

"It's the iPad," said the counselor. "It works better on my computer." So she made the note and then cursed herself because she'd forgotten to change the default academic negative category. Is that the most popular thing we do? Write negative things about kids? When I write about kids on venues like those I try to describe only behavior and let others decide whether it's negative or positive.

Then the counselor told me this girl has been having issues for a few years. I pushed several buttons on Skedula trying to pull up her previous report cards, but had no luck at all. It's very hard for me to fathom what is worthwhile about this program, though I will grant that one member of our faculty had nice things to say about it the other day. Still, the overwhelming number of comments I get are about time wasted trying to do things.

No one ever talked about Daedalus. I never wrote about it. We just used it. It was a handy tool. Teachers can always use handy tools. It's remarkable what we get are arcane, overblown, convoluted programs like Skedula--programs that cost schools up to 40 grand a year. To me, that's potentially the price of an additional teacher, and perhaps fewer classes of 34.

We have a very good relationship with our local precinct. They send a guy to our school who faithfully tickets absolutely everyone the day their registrations or inspections expire, and he comes to meetings and lectures us on all the things we can possibly do wrong, like parking more than 12 inches from the curb on days the streets are hopelessly covered with snow. Naturally, everyone adores this great work.

However, when students hang on the street in front of our school, often creating dangerous conditions, there's not much that can be done. The DOT cannot lay out whatever it would take to put one of those speed signs near our school. They are needed elsewhere, and one single horrific accident over the last few years is not sufficient for them to be stretching much-needed resources. Perhaps they need it in front of Mayor Bloomberg's house. Who's to say?

Our school is on the border of two precincts. A block away from our school is a shop many of us know to be dealing drugs, but the other precinct can't send valuable officers to deal with that. Apparently that's too far away and not enough of a crisis, so they can't send vital officers to deal with that.

What they can do, though, is dispatch officers right in front of that shop to make sure no one makes an improper left turn. Several members of our staff have been ticketed for that offense, which is far more egregious than people dealing drugs near a school. I know this because when the officer was writing me a ticket, I said to him, "You know, they're dealing drugs right behind you, and you're coming after me." The officer had a response. "We've got an undercover operation over there."

It must be a very effective undercover operation, because this officer has enough confidence to tell complete strangers about it. Also, none of us have heard word one about it, though I know there've been complaints about that shop for over a year. The important thing, I suppose, is to raise revenue to support the undercover operations that are publicly discussed, the results of which are apparent to no one whatsoever.

 There was a debate in New York last night. But it was not aimed at New Yorkers. They were written off months, if not years ago.

Since I first registered to vote, I've been a Democrat. I never voted against a Democrat until Governor 1% Cuomo showed up, peddling a brand of politics that looked to come straight out of the DFER playbook. I don't regret voting for Green candidate Howie Hawkins, since they've now got a regular spot on the NY State ballot as a result of people like me. Cuomo's opponent, what's his name, seemed such a vicious, frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic, that there didn't seem a whole lot of danger of his getting elected.

We live in a very funny country. When Jimmy Carter runs all over the world checking on free elections, you never see him establishing electoral colleges. That's because a widely accepted precept is the person who gets the most votes, wins. But that's not the case in these United States because of some insane rule the founding fathers made.  So when I tell a Republican friend I'm thinking of voting Green, he gets excited. "So that means you won't cancel me out!" he says, joyfully.

It's a nice thought. But the fact is, it doesn't matter who I vote for, who he votes for, or pretty much who anyone we know votes for. New York is already in Obama's column, and if there's a whisper of a doubt about that, we're looking at President Romney. A lot of my friends say they wouldn't want Romney to be President, even though he's got those binders full of women, and I agree with them. That's why I'm not voting for him. Some say that a vote for Green candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a vote for Romney. But it isn't. In fact, another Republican friend says, "If you really don't like Obama, you should vote for Romney." I find both arguments equally unpersuasive.

It might be different if I lived in Florida, or Ohio, or one of the handful of states that will actually decide the election. But it would be very tough for me to cast a ballot for the guy who made Arne Duncan Secretary of Education. I mean, has anyone ever seen him speak while Bill Gates drank a glass of water? How does a Democrat applaud the firing of an entire Rhode Island school staff? How does he get up in front of God and everybody and declare that Katrina was the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans? Would flooding Duncan's office be the best thing to happen to education in the United States?

I'd have to see it before making a decision. Would Obama still persist with this junk-science based Race to the Top? Would test scores continue to be the only thing determining whether neighborhood schools remained open? Would charter schools continue to be pushed as a silver bullet, even though it's pretty clear they aren't any better than public schools?

Things like that really upset me. A school kind of anchors the neighborhood, giving generations something in common, giving neighborhoods a meeting place that transcends religion and ethnicity. A good public school brings pride to a community. If there are problems, why not fix them instead of figuring out more efficient ways to put money into Eva Moskowitz' ample pockets?

These are the things I want answered before casting my largely useless vote for the likes of President Barack Obama. Romney is simply outlandish, beyond the pale. I watched him talk about "self-deportation" last night. How about those who ruin our economy practice "self-punishment" by jumping off tall buildings? That makes about as much sense as anything coming out of either side of Mitt's mouth.

Mayor Bloomberg has finally solved the problems of overcrowding and class size that have plagued his administration from the start. Critics have relentlessly attacked him as he failed to replace departing teachers, causing sharp rises in class sizes. Others bellyache about how, with all or most classes at maximum, students can even get the courses they need.

Principals are perplexed. Where can they put classes when there isn't any space in the building, and with all the budget cuts, they can't afford to hire any new teachers? Worse, they now have to consider the salaries of teachers they select, and have to pay a premium for experience. With the millions of impending observations they'll have to do with the new evaluation system, not to mention calculating precisely how much junk science VAM to add to the mix, they're at a virtual standstill.

Enter Mayor Bloombucks, with a brilliant solution. Why not simply pretend the problem doesn't exist and hope for the best? After all, if he doesn't tell the public how many kids are sitting in trailers instead of classrooms, if he doesn't tell the public how many classes are oversized, no one will know about the problem, and it will therefore not exist.

By thinking out of the box, Mayor4Life has confounded his critics, and decisively dealt with a problem that's frustrated lesser thinkers. The mayor plans also to ignore poverty, crime, and his rapidly sinking popularity in an effort to creatively take on the issues of our day. Should they be brought up by uppity parents or teachers, the mayor plans to focus on the giant soft drinks that he's managed to defeat.

A mayoral spokesperson, speaking under conditions of strict anonymity,  pointed out that giant soft drinks are not available in public schools, and under the stewardship of the second richest man in New York, will not be available for the foreseeable future. He then went on to say the UFT has taken no stand on this vital issue, and that this proved conclusively that billionaires care more about children than unionized teachers. He then spit on my shoes, walked into a 7-11, and purchased an enormous Coca-Cola flavored Slurpee, which was somehow exempted from the momentous ban.

As icing on top of the cake, the mayor managed to once again place "Children First. Always," by ensuring children are first and always in oversized classes and trailers. Because you sure as hell won't find Mike Bloomberg working under any such conditions.

It's tough getting doors slammed in your face. Yet if you're a UFT activist, it's hard to imagine how to avoid it. You could sign up and join Unity, if, unlike the overwhelming majority of teachers,  you get yourself invited. Yet, if you do that, you have to agree never to speak up against Unity positions. So, as an activist, you'd sign up to support, for one example, mayoral control, which has brought nothing but misery to working teachers.

You also sign up to support VAM, or value-added evaluation for teachers. UFT played a role in the state law that now requires a portion of our evaluation is determined by the all-important junk science without which Washington will withhold federal funds. That's part and parcel of Race to the Top, the brainchild of Arne Duncan, who decided to take his miserably failing Chicago programs national.

The discussion in the union is now largely over how much VAM we will use. Staunch Unity voices have said 20%, though I'm now hearing some say it can go up to 25. Others argue the local measure can bring it up to 40, though that, for now, has to be locally negotiated. Still others say it can be 100, since you can't get a passing grade unless you do well in it. Anyone who's actually studied this process knows the optimal percentage is zero.

It's okay, in my view, to have this discussion. It's okay to disagree. I understand the argument that our system gives us less crap than some others. It's indeed possible this was the best result, though I'm not persuaded.

What's really not okay is having a large faction of membership, some of the smartest and most active teachers in the city, absolutely shut out of consideration. I know some great people in Unity. I also know brilliant, well-informed, passionate individuals who are either part of the opposition or who have chosen not to sign the pledge not to speak their minds in public.

I don't get it. How can you be an activist if you won't speak your mind in public? How can you be a leader if you aren't free to question?

Why on earth won't UFT leadership open the doors to a large group of the most passionate unionists in the city? Isn't it time already?

One way or another, we will be heard.

It's funny. I put up a post saying Skedula sucks, and I got dozens of responses from people who'd never posted on the blog before, most of whom had never used Disqus, a very popular commenting platform. One person would say the technophobes love it, then an hour later someone would post saying, "I'm a technophobe, and I love it."

I got multiple posts calling me a liar, and characterizing those who criticize Skedula as Luddites or worse. I took them down, and I will continue to delete such posts, so please don't even bother.

I know many teachers, I know what teachers are passionate about, and I do not know one single teacher, not even a  tech-oriented teacher, who is passionate about a grading program, any grading program. I have read all the comments, and I do have a response.

Several posters insisted Skedula does not, by default, make posts public. They are wrong. When you write an anecdotal, the public box is checked by default, and you must uncheck it. I would not advise teachers to make negative posts open to all. If you've read Chancellor's Regulation A-421, you think twice about what you want people to hear. There's a prominent case of a teacher being fired for writing unsavory things about her students on Facebook. I'd think a school audience would put a teacher at even more risk.

I find it incredible there is no feature for a guidance referral, and thus far no poster, not even the ones saying they are from Skedula, has addressed this fundamental flaw. If you wish to send a message to a guidance counselor, you must then look up who the guidance counselor is, if you have not already done so, then check the name of the counselor. In a school like mine, with a dozen counselors, that's unnecessarily time-consuming. Daedalus selected the counselor automatically in one step.

Yes, I know, you need training, as many posters repeated. As a matter of fact, I've had it, and one of the reps from Skedula was in my school just last week. The first time I mentioned guidance referrals, the rep answered a question, but not the one I asked. When I repeated it again, he said the beauty of Skedula was that I could set it up to do it myself. That was akin to bringing my car in and having the mechanic tell me the beauty of his shop was that I could come in and do the repair myself. There was no discussion of adding this very basic and useful feature from this rep.

Let's look further at training. I'm using the Blogger platform right now. I've had zero training. I also had zero training in MS Word. Last week I edited a film using iMovie, with zero training, for the first time. The teachers using Engrade in my building did so with zero training. An intuitive program is user-friendly, and requires little training. I had zero training in Daedalus, and I've had zero training in any computer program I can think of. But let's go back to our experience with the Skedula rep.

A young tech teacher raised her hand and asked why a screen with our school name pops up every time we log in. She felt it was a waste of time. Could we bypass it? No, said the Skedula expert.
A young math teacher told me it was faster and more efficient to use a Delaney book to take attendance, and that using Skedula ate into valuable class time. In fact, several tech-oriented teachers had already told me they'd found taking attendance with Skedula was awkward, so I haven't even bothered.


Several issues came up about viewing students. Why were their faces blocked? That was because of the iPad. Why do we have scrolling issues? The iPad. But there will be an iPad app, said the rep, sometime soon, that will fix that. Pardon me if I believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, the teachers at my school, almost all of whom use iPads (on which they needed no training), can wait.

Other commenters on the blog were thrilled you don't have to write grades on Skedula. You don't have to use the EGG. Yet the rep was unable to demonstrate it, saying the grades were not up yet. The principal made sure to set up an EGG because our grades are due on Friday. I suppose he could've used Skedula and hoped for the best, but I thought it was a good idea when he bet on a sure thing. Still, maybe when Skedula works, it works. Again, I'll believe it when I see it.

Today I wanted to pull up a student schedule. I clicked "schedule" and got a choice of three schedules. I could view the student's test schedule, if I wished, and there was some other schedule, I don't recall which. Perhaps there is a school somewhere where people commonly need student test schedules, but with only 28 years teaching experience, I don't know where it is. So there I found an extra step, for no particular reason, when I was trying to find something very common--here there should be a default, and it should be the student schedule.

Now I know I will get another mountain of responses telling me how wonderful Skedula is, and how it's changed their school cultures, and their lives, and how birth control pills were a relatively unimportant invention compared to Skedula. But here's a fact. I talk to teachers and administrators all day at my school.

Not one single person has had anything good to say about it. We use it, because the school probably paid 40K for it, and is stuck with it for the year.  I use it every day because I have no choice. I find it counter-intuitive, and not user friendly.

In summary, please review the headline.

Of course, the papers are full of horror stories about teachers. We have jobs for life. We sit and read the newspaper while our students murder one another. We can't see it because we choose the New York Times, that great big paper that completely blocks our range of view. Furthermore, we're elitist and out of touch for choosing that over the Daily News. Never mind that the editorial board of the Times hates us just as much as that of the News.

In reality, Mayor Bloomberg and his fellow "reformers" wish to fire us for any reason or no reason. Case in point, this young woman, in a story from the New York Post. She's been fired because of photos taken before she started working for the DOE, photos that she claims have been photoshopped for the internet. Apparently, because there are scantily clad photos of her available, now much more widely so because of the story, she cannot advise students on what courses to take, what colleges to attend, or how to be more successful in school.

It looks like the DOE is mired in the illusion that we're all Beaver Cleaver, living in Pleasantville, sleeping in twin beds like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Any teacher who admits to having a body with more sexual characteristics than a Ken doll is unfit to teach. Of course this is absurd on its face.

But we see that the DOE is willing to take this sort of thought to the point at which they discharge someone. Judging from the story, this young woman started out as a teacher and later became a counselor, which would explain why she hasn't got tenure. It would also explain why she can be discharged without due process. In fact, a probationary teacher can be dismissed for a bad haircut. Or even a good one.

I'm certain that many of us would have been arbitrarily and capriciously dismissed if it were up to Mayor4Life Bloomberg. Having tenure is the wall that keeps him from simply dumping every experienced teacher and replacing us with cheap inexperienced newbies. Despite the nonsense spewed by astroturfers like Tim Daly and his Rhee-originate TNTP, there is simply no substitute for experience. Daly and Rhee don't go to doctors who haven't practiced, or hire $30 an hour lawyers.

That they'd want our children educated solely by neophytes belies their nonsensical claims of putting children first. Their goal is to funnel as much money as possible away from our children into the hands of those who least need it. And they attack tenure because paying those of us who devote our lives to teaching children, to them, is a waste of money.

But we must be ever-vigilant. After Bloombucks loses this lawsuit, he will certainly redouble his efforts to weaken and destroy us. We've given him far too much, and can afford to give him not one inch more.

My daughter is the most patriotic American I've ever seen. First thing, when she got into high school, she joined the JROTC, and she's been gung-ho over it ever since. She's on the drill team, the rifle team, in leadership, and she's got a chest full of medals. She'll go in at six AM to do I have no idea what, and stay until 8 PM to continue doing it. She'll go away weekends with them to practice it even more.

One weekend I got a call from her CO. Someone had fallen on her while they were doing some sort of exercise, and she'd hurt her wrist. Could I please drive out and pick her up? I said OK. I got out of what I was doing and started driving. Halfway there, my car broke down. There were all sorts of lights flashing on the dashboard, but I managed to drive it to a friend's house. He was kind enough to drive me to the airport, the only place you could rent a car on a Saturday night.

On our way, I got a call. Daddy, can I stay the weekend? I don't feel so bad. It was kind of embarrassing explaining to my friend, who'd just dragged himself out of his comfortable home, that we didn't need to go to the airport after all. Worse yet was finding myself a ride home. But after I did all that, she came home on a school bus Sunday, and we took her to a doctor the next day. She'd fractured her wrist and had a cast for the next few weeks.

Yesterday she was out on a walk to benefit sufferers of autism. For some reason, this walk entailed the JROTC entering a bouncy house, where yet another girl had fallen on her, this time injuring her knee. I was able to find a walk-in clinic this time, and she's hobbling around on crutches with some kind of knee immobilizer.

She's very upset that I won't let her go to any of these early-morning or late-afternoon drill things until she gets better. When I pointed out that she wouldn't be able to participate, she said, "Yes, but I can go to the meet even if I don't participate." Yet I stubbornly refuse to get up and drive her there to watch.

It makes me very apprehensive. For one thing, in the professional military, there are worse things than people falling on you. But she, at 16, wants to be in the military precisely as much as I, at 16, did not. Teenage rebellion is simply not what it used to be.

Actually, in the case of unions, it probably doesn't matter whether the deed was good, bad or otherwise. The editorial pages made up their minds long ago.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew wrote an opinion piece in the Daily News, explaining that it is, in fact, Bloomberg who's blocking the much-vaunted evaluation system that we've all been reading about. Mulgrew correctly points out that there is a framework, and that he was instrumental in establishing it.

UFT sources have told me that Bloomberg is still angry that 13% of working teachers will be able to get fair hearings to appeal ineffective ratings, and therefore won't act toward making it happen. I believe that. It's ironic, because personally, I'm more upset about the 87% of the teachers who won't get a fair hearing.

So Mulgrew put out an olive branch, and told the truth. What does he get for his efforts? Well, this looks like a slap in the face from the News editorial board. The News editorial is superficial, and unpersuasive to anyone who knows the facts, but who knows how many News readers know the facts? There's a larger point here.

It doesn't pay to give in to the "reformers." Give them an inch, and they complain you still have one yourself. The plan to "reform" teacher evaluations is a great case in point. By capitulating to the idiocies perpetrated by Education Secretary/ DFER Stooge Arne Duncan, NY teachers will now be judged by VAM, which is nothing more than junk science. Hundreds of DC teachers have been fired on precisely this basis, and bringing this to our state will benefit no one but those wishing to see more teachers randomly fired.

Precisely how are evaluations improved by adding junk science to the mix? "Reformers" want to fire as many teachers as possible, and this will certainly allow them to hit some they wouldn't get otherwise. The union complains, justifiably, that supervisors can be arbitrary or vindictive when rating teachers. Is there a perfect system? Probably not. Is there a better one. Probably.

But here we are, in 2012, discussing whether it's 20%, 25%, 40%, or even 100% junk science we will use to evaluate the people who teach our children. How much, precisely, do you think junk science will help us to do that?

In our school, we have a new system. It's new and very glitzy looking. And you can enter grades and attendance on it, if you dare. We used to have a system called Daedalus, with which we could look up student schedules, and phone numbers, and things like that. You can do that in Skedula too, with only a few more inconvenient steps.

Daedalus had a big calendar you could pull up and show to parents. All the cuts would show a sea of pink, if I recall correctly. It was a very dramatic thing to show a parent. Skedula does something, but not that. In my school, there are a lot of technophobic teachers. I expect them not to like new systems. This year, it's not them, but the young tech-oriented teachers who are complaining.

In Skedula, if you send a note, it is by default public. This is pretty inconvenient. Several people have written things they did not expect everyone in the building to have access to, but there you are. I like to send notes to guidance counselors. In Daedalus, you'd press a button, write a note, and it would go to the kid's counselor, whether or not you happened to know who the counselor was. That way, at the end of the year, when the principal asked me why the hell I failed that kid, I could point to this correspondence. In Skedula, you have to look up the counselor and do it yourself. You may as well use your email account.

After noting that, I found an option to send comments to Skedula. They don't seem to really want them, because a box that could not have been more than one square inch popped up. I dutifully wrote a complaint, but it didn't go through.

Skedula looks more professional than bare-bones Daedalus. But Daedalus was more simple, more intuitive, more user-friendly. I miss it. Teachers who've adopted their own online grading systems, like Engrade, swear they're better and easier, and lament being asked to swap.

We need not even mention ARIS here, a total waste of 80 million bucks, soon to be scrapped for a state system that will no doubt prove more costly and even worse.

Does your school have an online system? What is it? How do you like it? Is it free so we can use it instead of Skedula?

My wife steadfastly refuses to drive on parkways. I'm trying to persuade her otherwise, and I was driving her around giving her instructions. "You know, you turn here, wait for the car, and, umm.... then you get on."

My daughter, in the back seat, said, "You know what you sound like? You sound like a teacher who finished the class early and is trying to fill up the last few minutes."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"You're improvising," she said. "You have no idea what you're talking about and you're just making it up as you go along."

I was shocked. She was right, of course. I really had little hope of persuading my wife and was just describing my actions. But that my daughter would connect that with what she saw in her teachers really surprised me. I don't think I ever paid enough attention to my teachers to notice them scrambling for time. Of course, when I went to school, teachers would do things like have us read books aloud one page at a time and no one gave it a second thought.

These kids today are watching us more closely than I'd thought, apparently. So what do you do if your lesson comes to an end and you have five extra minutes? Things like that happened to me when I first started, and resulted in things like kids giving a bum's rush out the door a few minutes before the bell. I was very uncomfortable with that.

What I do now is overplan, always. I never finish all the activities I plan, and that's OK. I start from wherever I need to the next day. I actually like the idea of improvisation, of letting the class go where it goes. If the kids or I can take it somewhere interesting, somewhere that grabs their attention and keeps them hooked, that's great. If something funny happens, we can focus on it.

But I would never just leave a blank space to be filled and hope for the best. If inspiration hits, great. And if something I've used before is appropriate for the moment, that's great too. But I don't want repeats of things I didn't like when I was a new teacher, so I always plan too much.

My daughter's comment indicates I've been giving kids too little credit, and that they actually know what's going on. Do you ever have a plan that finishes before you need it to? What do you do when that happens?

There's a great piece by Texas superintendent John Kuhn suggesting that schools reflect our communities, for better or worse.  Can we improve our schools and communities? Of course we can. Should we close them and turn them over to billionaires who wouldn't want to live or study with us? Probably not. Yet that's precisely what we're doing with our schools, as we follow programs more aligned to the druthers of Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton family rather than anything based on research or demonstrated practice.

Now they have a second major Hollywood production, demonizing teachers as the source of all that afflicts our communities. There are great reasons to be suspicious of its motives, even if we ignore its ridiculous claim to be based on a true story. There are a few things I've experienced my entire working life that I'd like to mention here.

One is that teaching has never been a career for those looking to get wealthy. You have to love it or you don't last, and indeed, half of all prospective teachers are gone within five years. For most of my career, NYC was dying for teachers, ran job fairs, recruited internationally, and offered free training for anyone who'd sign up. They did this because their insistence on paying the lowest wage in the area made it very tough to recruit. And despite what you may have heard, it's no picnic being a teacher. I remember what it was like in front of 34 teenagers before I got the hang of it, and had I not done so, I'd certainly be among those who walked.

In fact, bad teachers are not roaming the earth like a plague of zombies, and we are simply not in crisis. And please, while we can tolerate GW Bush as President, or Arne Duncan as education secretary, don't lecture me on merit. Tenure exists so people like me can speak up against the abject nonsense propagated by such figures without being tossed into the street. I have seen people "counseled out" and I have seen people fired. The simple fact, though, is most people who can't hack it simply leave of their own accord.

Whatever the movie may contend, I'm not sitting around watching Rome burn, and nor are the overwhelming majority of my colleagues. Those who demonize us are no different from garden-variety bigots who target a racial group or sexual orientation to stir up hatred among those with no better use for their time. We are the ones who spend every waking day with children. We are the ones who look after them while parents work, and we are the ones who try to inspire them to find a direction in life, whether or not they pass the often ridiculous multiple choice tests imposed by the corporations who profit from them.

By publicly ridiculing our profession, by degrading working conditions, by presenting corporate fairy tales by precisely the same folks who jettisoned the economy with their insatiable avarice we are not much helping our children. In fact, Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Joel Klein, Rahm Emanuel and their ilk do not patronize the test-prep, high class-sized factory-like institutions they're trying to create for our children. We need to reject their indulgence in fairy-tales like "Won't Back Down" and insist our kids get what their kids get--small class sizes, individual attention, and assessment without ridiculous high-stakes tests.

Finally, we need to recognize one major consequence of degrading and insulting this profession. I teach high-needs kids exclusively, and when corporate hacks degrade teaching, they're actively trying to remove a viable path to middle class for kids like those I serve. Last year I had a former student as a student teacher. She would be great at my job. Her very existence as a teacher sends kids the message, "I did it, and so can you."

Making her into a test-prepping, drone-like, wage slave is not what she needs, not what our kids need, and not good for America. Firing her for test scores that are likely as not meaningless is good for neither her nor our children, all of whom need more, not fewer opportunities to make it in this increasingly tough job market.

In fact, no matter how much money bumbling Bill Gates gets his hands on, he will never know anything about public education or the struggles of our children. And it is we, not the billionaires, who spend every waking hour looking toward their best interests.

I usually spend about 10 hours inside the school building on any given day.  That means 50 hours/week.  Add in the time I spend on the weekend and you're probably up to about 55.  Which sounds like a more-than-adequate work week.  Yet I can't figure out how that never seems like enough time.

And trust me, those are ten badass hours.  I usually work through my lunch, or if I do stop, I only take about half the period.  Factor in a bathroom or coffee break here and there and I'm still working for nine or nine-and-a-half solid hours.  How is that not enough time?

I don't know, but since I'm not Jewish, I suppose I'm doing my own personal version of the Day of Atonement in my home office today with a nice thick folder of student essays and two lesson plans to write.  And even so, all that work, which will likely take a few hours, will only get me through Friday.  They say that work will expand to fill the available space, and I think that's true, but I'm not doing much beyond what I need to do to keep my head above water, either.  I don't advise a club or serve on any committees; since I'm teaching a brand-new class this year, I decided I need to have time to focus on planning.  And it's turning out to be pretty demanding.

I realize that this is hardly breaking news to any of my colleagues, but as always, I actively seek tips on time management.  I've clearly mastered the "saying no" part, but I'm wondering how I still don't seem to have enough time to do more than just barely stay ahead of the curve.

In the United States today, you can pretty much sell anything. Maybe those of us who've been trying to respond the the education "reform" movement have been going about it all wrong. Is it really a good idea to simply address the issues media brings up? Maybe we should ignore them and simply start attacking the media. I mean, sure, there are good reasons to do so.

What can you say about an education summit hosted by Rush Limbaugh aficionado Brian Williams? What can you say about a major network that excludes Diane Ravitch from the conversation? How about a major network that witnessed a pivotal event, the CTU strike, and did not see fit to invite CTU President Karen Lewis?

To top it off, what can you say about said summit, for the second time, hosting an anti-teacher, anti-labor, mythological Hollywood production as though it were newsworthy? As if that were not enough, there are real grassroots efforts that receive no coverage at all from these great thinkers.

For myself, I'm going to Darkest New Jersey today rather than subject myself to this one-sided nonsensical extravaganza. I don't do that lightly. But that's how strongly I feel about it. I mean, we could ask real questions:

How do you feel about NBC's so-called Education Nation? 

Are they adding value? Should they be turned around? And since they're already privatized, should we perhaps try making NBC public? 

I'm not saying there's any evidence that making the network public will improve it, because "reforms" don't hold up when you actually demand evidence. But perhaps we should move away from presenting truth, and simply attack them relentlessly, without offering any reason whatsoever. We could ignore reality altogether, and focus on making stuff up for no other reason than to make them look bad.

That seems to be what "reformers" and "objective" news organizations like NBC does to teachers. Is it time for us to launch a campaign to impose fanciful, baseless nonsense on those who vilify us and pretend to give us news? Would we have an edge over the "reformers" if we didn't bother with even the pretense of being reality-based?

I was giving placement tests to incoming ESL students, and a young woman came in with her sister, who'd just gotten here. She said she had graduated from our school recently, and asked about one of my young colleagues. I told her I was sorry, she wasn't here, but why not leave a note? I gave her a piece of paper and she began writing, all excited.

When my colleague got back, I told here there was a note for her. She pulled it out of her mailbox and looked that the smiley faces on its folded cover, and began to resemble them. The note said thank you for all you did for me, thank you for helping me with English, I'm in college now, and concluded asking my colleague to pray for her. I hoped that was out of some religious conviction rather than some sense of hopelessness, but we'll never know.

Nonetheless, my colleague was thrilled, as happy as I've ever seen her. She said, simply, "This is why I'm a teacher." I don't suppose Bill Gates would understand that. Nor would the disingenuous sycophants who leave teaching, take Gates money and flock to astroturf groups like E4E. But I know exactly how she felt. Notes like those mean more than observations from administrators. I treasure them. And the fact is, most of us are moved far more by things like that than getting a few extra bucks for raising test scores.

That's not to say we don't want money. It's atrocious that demagogues like Mike Bloomberg publicly claim to care about education, but actually issue raises to all city employees but educators. We know how little regard he has for us, and how much he cares about stuffing the pockets of entrepreneurs like Eva Moskowitz and Geoffrey Canada. Next month will be four years we've gone without a contract. It's very tough to be treated with such vicious contempt by those who, ostensibly, are your employers.

But we still know what it's all about. We still love the kids. And as our brothers and sisters in Chicago have shown, ultimately it is we, the teachers, who won't back down.

Listening to coverage of the now-concluded teachers' strike in Chicago on NPR on my way back to the 5 boroughs from the hinterlands yesterday, one thing really struck me in how the Chicago teachers discussed the CTU: the openness with which CTU members discussed Karen Lewis, President of the CTU.  There is far from a universal opinion on how Lewis has handled the breakdown in contract negotiations and the strike, even though the CTU delegates have voted to approve the framework for a new contract and end the strike effective today.

Members of the CTU frankly discussed Lewis's leadership in this time of what must be called a crisis.  Several bluntly questioned her ability to lead following the drastic measure of a teachers' strike.  Others called her too confrontational, while yet others defended her as tough yet pragmatic.  This will clearly be a discussion in the CTU for the coming days, but that's just the point: it will, in fact, be a discussion.

I'll be honest here and say that I'm not as well-informed about UFT leadership as I'd like to be, but I cannot even imagine our local NPR affiliate covering a candid conversation about said leadership, let alone most rank-and-file UFTers having it in a public forum.  God knows there is plenty of grassroots opposition to Mulgrew and Unity, but I only know that from being involved with the teacher blogging community.  If you paid attention to the mainstream media, I think, you'd get the impression that the UFT is a monolith in lockstep march with Mulgrew, and that's far from the truth.

I wouldn't want to be in the CTU's shoes.  They're going to be fighting a public relations battle over the strike, hammering out the dirty details of the new contract, and, you know, trying to educate the children, too.  Yet I do envy their ability to have a spirited, fair, and public conversation about their leadership--even a leadership that, to me, seems quite a bit tougher than what we have here.

After hearing the CTU strike was nearing a resolution, I was surprised to hear that it was, in fact, going to continue for two more days. I was more surprised, though, at the rationale behind that decision.

“This union is a democratic institution, which values the opportunity for all members to make decisions together. The officers of this union follow the lead of our members,” President Lewis said. 

Have you ever heard of such a thing? She's going to walk the picket line with her members, tell them what's going on, hear what they think, and make a decision based on that. The officers follow the lead of the members. That is leadership. That is democracy. We have a very, very limited notion of what democracy is in this country. It's not, in fact, choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.

Democracy is when we are part of the discussion, when decisions rise from the people. Democracy is not when you get to choose between two people, neither of whom you'd have chosen as a last resort.

Furthermore, democracy is not when you don't even get to do that.

Karen Lewis knows what democracy is. She knows who she represents. She is a beacon in a very dark time.

I am so impressed by her.

It's easy to condemn the Chicago teachers for walking out. All the papers are doing it. If they cared about the kids, they'd go to work. They'd settle. They'd be happy they had jobs. It's certainly true that plenty of people do not.

Not only that, but teachers are role models. What sort of example do they set when they don't go to work?

But no one seems to ask--why did Rahm Emanuel unilaterally renege on a collectively bargained 4% pay increase? Does anyone think there would be a strike if he hadn't done that?

And why did Mayor Emanuel think the teachers would agree to a 20% longer day for a 2% increase? Did he think teachers would agree to unspecified raises for the three following years for only those he deemed worthy? Should they have trusted in his good intentions after he broke an agreement they bargained in good faith?

Does he think teachers are stupid enough to fall for that?

Chicago teachers are facing day 5 on the picket line. They deserve our full support. Please contribute to their solidarity fund. I have, and if they're still out next week, I'll do so again.

Well, we're almost a week into the new school year.  How is everyone feeling?  I'm doing pretty well, other than the fact that my body is still in, "What?  I need a regular sleep schedule and I need to get up at 5 a.m.?  SERIOUSLY?" mode.  But I can't complain.

This is my seventh year teaching, which means I'm starting to get pretty expensive, so I better be worth it to my principal which means I have opportunities to be more deeply reflective about my craft.  (Yes.  That sounds better.)  But, for what it's worth, I did have a pretty reflective summer, and I've formulated a theory about teaching that I thought might be worth sharing with all of you.  And it revolves around music, which is always fun to think and write about, at least for me.  I've been playing music in my classroom every day, and it seems to help my mood and focus as much as it helps the kids'.

I think when you're first starting to teach, it's like first starting to play an instrument.  There are so many moving parts--the parts of the instrument, reading the music, posture, breathing, dynamics--that you can barely keep them all straight.  Focusing on one area at a time often means everything else falls apart.  Trying to be good at everything at once means that everything is mediocre or worse.  And you just soldier through that first year or two, and if, every so often, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" comes out recognizably, you call that a good day.

Then, after those first (say) two years, you're in a beginning ensemble.  You can more or less do everything at once.  Maybe none of it is great yet, but you won't bring down your fellow musicians in the rest of the ensemble, either.  Sometimes you can look away from the music and work on your posture, your breathing, those little things that make a decent piece of music sound lovely. You can lean on them and learn from them, and maybe once in a great while you'll get a tiny little solo.

Years five and six, then, are like playing in a pretty good classical ensemble.  Maybe you can show off a little now, take a fancier solo or two.  But your eyes might be glued to the music even more than they used to be, because the music is getting really complicated.  You want to play pieces you've never played before, and you can play them, but it's still tough.  It takes a lot of practice and preparation.

Then, at some point, you're playing jazz.  You have years and years of practice and preparation.  You know hundreds of scores by heart and from memory.  You can play a piece perfectly but go off on a gorgeous riff on a moment's notice, and keep it going as long as you want or need to.

I don't think I'm a jazz musician yet, and I think I'm surrounded by a lot of very disciplined classical musicians.  I think that's okay.  But I sure would like to be a jazz musician eventually--or, more aptly, a jazz teacher.

In solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Chicago, who are on strike. If you want to help, please contribute to their solidarity fund. I have.

Remember that Mayor Rahm Emanuel reneged on a negotiated 4% raise. He then offered a 2% raise, with undetermined merit pay to follow as he saw fit and demanded, for this, that teachers work a 20% longer school day.

Rahm's corporate pals changed the law so that CTU needed a 75% vote of union members to authorize a strike, thinking that would never happen. Some "reformer" whose name I don't recall boasted of this at a meeting. When the vote came, 98% voted to authorize a strike, which came to 90% of union members.

Rahm criticized them for not waiting to hear what the arbitrator would say. But when the arbitrator came back, he recommended a 15-20% raise for teachers. Rahm was not pleased. Chicago teachers rejected it too, because it did not address school conditions.

A sticking point in current negotiations is teacher evaluations. Rahm is insisting on VAM junk science, while CTU insists they stick to reality. Personally, I'm pro-reality.

Let's see whether Rahm's mentor, President Barack Obama, finds his comfortable shoes and stands with labor today.

Here's a sign from Chicago--ground zero as of midnight tonight.

My guilty pleasure is watching cooking shows. I don't cook that much, but I'm fascinated by food competitions, and also by shows that try to help restaurants. One of the things I notice is that Gordon Ramsay, as nuts as he gets, never says, "The best way to save this restaurant is to close it and replace it with another one." Of course, when he gets to a restaurant, it's often on its last legs anyway.

I was watching a show called Restaurant Stakeout, noticing that they planned to judge the service via observation, when suddenly the host identified a helpful employee. The restaurant owner said, "Danielle's a friend of mine's daughter. She's a sweet girl. She's also a teacher."

This means Danielle teaches all day, then waits tables at night. Why the hell should Danielle have to live like that? I really shouldn't criticize. I taught college at night for almost 20 years. In retrospect, I wonder if I'd have made more money waiting tables. A friend of mine often tells the story of the pay cut he took when he went from being a waiter to a teacher.

Yet, to read the paper, you'd think we've got a free ride, jobs for life, a union that wants us to sit around while kids fail. That's awful. Also awful is people like Danielle, who have no time for personal lives. It's a good thing she's not in some charter school working 200 hours a week, because then she wouldn't even make the extra money, and when those anxiety attacks started coming, who knows whether she'd even have insurance?

A few years ago, I was talking to a young teacher about movies. She told me she couldn't afford to go to movies. I don't know what she did with her money, or what she owed in loans, but she wasn't living high on the hog or anything, and it broke my heart she couldn't even afford something most of us would take for granted.

I'm tired of hearing all that crap about how we can't pay all teachers more, but only the good ones. If we aren't good, why the hell did you hire us in the first place? Most teachers I know are good. Still, teachers would be better if they didn't have to read about how awful they were in the tabloids every single day. Teachers would be better if they were treated with the respect we show abject strangers. Teachers would be better if folks like Mike Bloomberg didn't wake up one morning and announce every city worker gets an 8% raise except teachers, who can all go to hell.

Danielle needs a raise too. Teachers would be better if they didn't need second jobs.

Less than 48 hours before the school year began, I got an e-mail from a student I'll call Sarah.  Sarah just moved to the U.S. last year, but she knew enough English to get the ball rolling, and she's a bright and hard-working young lady.  She did very well at our school.

Sarah's e-mail, however, said that her mother wanted her to transfer schools to be closer to her sisters, who would be attending school in Manhattan.  Honestly, it made me so upset that I couldn't respond to her right away. Sarah's had quite a bit of upheaval in her life in the past year: moving to a new country without her siblings at first, starting at a new school, going back to her native country for almost a month in March.  And she thrived despite all of that.  She's doing well.  So maybe this next move will be fine for her too.

But I was still angry.  It made me feel like no one in Sarah's family is looking out for her, that she's a widget to be constantly repositioned depending on what's most convenient for everyone else.  Maybe it's a question of culture, of different values.  Maybe Sarah expected this and understands it and is totally okay with it.  I don't know.  I just don't understand why she can't stay someplace where she was doing well and why she has to have her life torn apart again.

Sorry to start my school year posting on such a down note here.  I'm sad on Sarah's behalf and not sure how vehemently I can oppose this particular move at school, so here I am.  I guess I can say that that's the worst thing that happened to me yesterday and I was, on the whole, very excited to be back and to meet my new kids, and see my old ones again, tomorrow.

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.   Here's something from Miss Malarkey. And whatever you do, don't forget Miss Eyre's excellent series on what no one will tell you about working for the DoE.

HT-The JLV