No More Fingers, Action

Great job everyone.....not.

To wrap up this series of posts on stakeholders, I thought I'd do something terribly difficult to pull off- point the finger at EVERYone for allowing American education to take a nose-dive. This is something I've thought about lately when listening to various people state how fixing one or two things in the system will solve ALL of the problems. I don't hold any super-advanced degrees in ed theory or policy, nor do I have a great deal of experience, but I'm starting to suspect, based on that little experience as well as my knowledge of American history and American education, that a system as massive as our education system (which is technically more than fifty separate systems) cannot be "fixed" through a couple simple changes in policy, but will require a movement from the masses.

What I can say is that it is not just one group of stakeholders that is to blame for the woes of our education system. Sure their are terrible teachers out there. There are also abhorrent administrators, really bad parents, and young people in schools that can certainly cannot be called students. The long and the short of it is that a large number of us are falling down on the job and then pointing fingers elsewhere instead of demanding that our own ranks improve and that we ourselves do our jobs.

Sounds cynical, right? Perhaps it is. And bit wishy-washy? Sure. Regardless, I would like for people to stop blaming the parents, the unions, the students,the teachers and/or the administrators individually as the downfalls of the students' education and get more people to start looking for solutions to fix all of these vital roles. The idea rolling around in my head recently has been to find ways to hold each group of stakeholders accountable in a way that will promote the achievement of our students. As of right now the most popular attack seems directed at teachers and teachers' unions, but their accountability is being sought in such ways that, to me, seem detrimental to students.

The entire country has a vested interest in creating the best education system (or systems, depending on your views on state control of education) on the planet for all of our children. If we're going to get serious about educating ALL Americans in a top-notch way we need to stop bitching, stop the finger-pointing, hold up our end of the bargain, and then (and only then) demand that each major group of stakeholders be held accountable as well.

More on accountability later. I feel like I've strayed away from directing these posts toward advice for the first years and those in school of education. There's not a lot to be said about this topic save for the fact that perhaps in the first year you shouldn't worry as much about this as how you hold things together in the classroom. Last year I certainly wasn't thinking as much about how to keep students, parents, other teachers, and administrators accountable because I couldn't even keep things in line in the tiny part of the system for which I was directly responsible. Telling others how they should be held accountable didn't cross my mind as much as dreams of reaming out other stakeholders for not doing a damn thing to help (aggression that was somewhat, but not wholly, misplaced).


Today's Wine: Bodega Sur de los Andes Malbec. This guy was really very good. We had it at Pasita in the West Village. The place was great and the wine well-balanced, not very fruity and not too dry. Great by itself.

O Captain! My Captain!

Without a strong administration, a school will capsize and teachers and students alike will be left to swim for it. In that case the students are encouraged to swim to shore where they would have disembarked, but the teachers are left to tread water and save as many as possible for as long as they can. The frustrating thing is that the captain(s) don’t necessarily go down with the ship in these cases.

What I’ve heard…

I spoke with several superintendents while in the School of Ed, and each said that the most difficult job they’ve ever run up against is that of a high school principal. Between all of the public appearances expected, the equivalent to running a business as well as being the leader of teachers and ensuring the emotional and developmental well-being of hundreds of students, the job demands every ounce of one’s energy as well as the vast majority of one’s time. Personal time is a term referring to the small amount of sleep they get. The principals I’ve spoken with in NYC have said that the most difficult job they’ve bashed into has been that of first-year teacher in the city. Perhaps they’re just being modest.

That said about the difficulty of the position, the leaders of the school- Principal, Assistant Principals and Dean of Discipline- are vital to the success at the school. Without competent and talented people in these positions it’s nearly impossible for a school to be very successful even with master teachers. These people need to be able to maintain morale, recruit like mad and rake in sponsors to support the ranks holding the line. They must keep the confidence of the community and they must understand the trials, tribulations and successes of the community so they know what the students will face during their tenure at the school and thereafter. They must also boost the morale of their troops while maintaining the support of parents- two groups notorious for infighting. Good administrators are also expected to know the names of most of their students, and increasingly the needs of each student- especially as NYC moves to a small school model.

And that’s just some of it. In spite of the fact that the job is gargantuan, the sort of people being commissioned as administrators varies widely. Some are great, some are driving education into the ground, and some seem simply to be holding on and waiting for something- at times either a paycheck or someone else to fix the problems they face in the system.

All of that said, I’ve tried to categorize as best I can the administrators I’ve seen during my short tenure in the field.

Killers of the Classroom

The Corrupt
These range from those who are administrators for the paycheck to those who embezzle from the school system. After a year and a half in the field it’s frightening how often I’ve heard instances of the latter happening. Colleagues have described storage closets full of school supplies that were off-limits to the staff. They’d be filled with expensive supplies and then emptied into non-descript white vans at the front of the school.

The Incompetent
To be a strong leader you must be able to demonstrate what it is you want those following you to do. For a lot of reasons, the default attitude of teachers is skeptical when talking to anyone who is trying to tell them what should be done in the classroom. A principal who does not radiate the idea that she herself is a master teacher will simply not inspire confidence in her staff. Unfortunately many incompetent teachers who do not want to quit the field, but who are not making it in the classroom, decide to move up the ladder to an admin position. Also unfortunately, many of these are promoted by their superiors simply to get them out of the classroom. While I respect the urgency of removing the incompetent from the classroom, promoting people because it’s impossible to get rid of them is not promoting the health of the system. To be sure, this is not the only way the incompetent get into these leadership roles.

The Tyrannical

Sometimes the responsibility of being an administrator goes to the head of those at the helm. While they may fall in the category of incompetent as well, these folks try to make up for the lack of leadership skills by flexing all of their muscle both with students and with staff practically all of the time. If you are unaware, schools can really do very little in terms of punishing students. Flexing and flexing is good and fine if you’re looking in the mirror, but not necessarily when trying to impress your staff and students simply by demonstrating your legal ability to tell them what to do.

The Insane
My girlfriend was oftentimes at odds with one of these at a school she used to work in. That AP was arrested for stabbing her boyfriend with scissors. The incident actually made the newspaper, but because the boyfriend dropped the charges the AP was re-instated without recourse almost immediately.

Follow them to the Front Line
When it comes to administrators and teachers, it’s oftentimes easier to spot the bad ones, rather than the good ones. Perhaps that’s why we concentrate so much on them. If you take any time to look, however, it’s easy to spot the great leaders. They inspire real confidence, show you what they expect and demand excellence. If they're good at their jobs their staffs will follow them in their entirety (or nearly in their entirety) and will be able to hold the line far more successfully.

Great administrators certainly have different styles and generally land somewhere on a spectrum between a very top-down, directive management style and the more bottom-up, allow the staff freedom to succeed sort of style. It seems that the most successful of them strike a balance somewhere in the middle, perhaps on an issue-specific basis. By that I mean that there are specific issues on which administrators must hand down their decisions with an iron fist, and others that must be resolved organically by lower-level staff members. Regardless, its tough to categorize them other than saying they’ve struck an effective balance somewhere on this spectrum.


This might warrant another post altogether as well, but in a nutshell, I believe that as with teachers, there is not a large enough pool of highly-trained, experienced and brilliant people vying for these jobs. These are our captains. They should be the ones directing us and determining how to best utilize our resources as a cohesive unit in order to give the best education possible to our students. Without strong leadership teachers are left to shut and lock their classroom doors and slug it out themselves. When they march off to war in isolation teachers might put up a great fight, but the students suffer tremendously in the long term. It’s also far more likely that a teacher will one day drown when this is the case.


The leadership of a school cannot be taken lightly. Unfortunately, great leaders are difficult to find. Principals vary from those young, bright individuals starting up their own schools to those who have PhD’s, a century of experience and are simply taking over for established schools. These people must be leaders, politicians and great educators. Their jobs demand that they work essentially without pause the entire time they hold their position.

As with teachers, we need to be able to get rid of the bad ones, attract more applicants to the field and applaud those that are successful in their positions. Unfortunately I’m not sure we’re doing any of these things effectively, nor will we in the near future given the way people are determining the success of these leaders.

Today's Wine: Maipe Malbec, 2009. The description at that link was pretty spot-on. It's fruity, not too dry and well-balanced. Very acceptable for a bottle around ten bucks and it went well with some cheap but amazing Mexican carry out.

Teachers Are Sinking the Boat!

...and plugging the holes, and rowing, and building new boats, and...

Teachers really tick me off sometimes. We've dug ourselves in, isolated ourselves from other stakeholders, allowed substandard educators to join our ranks and have not done a very good job of keeping up the professional edge we once had. That said, we're also sending more students to college than ever before while doing everything in our power to hold on while the arc of education is tossed to and fro by the political and social tide. We are, for better and worse, the men and women that are escorting young Americans to their futures and we range from excellent to terrible. Aside from the students themselves, teachers are the lifeblood of the education system. If there is a major problem with that system, as more of America is beginning to assume, it is natural to examine our ranks to see what is going on. It would be ludicrous not to take these steps. Upon exploring the ranks of pedagogues, one might find there is a pretty interesting mix out there.

I've now worked in three very different settings: rural Kansas as a sub and student teacher; on a U.S. military base in Germany as a long-term student teacher; and in the South Bronx as a first and second year, full-time teacher. As with the parents, it's tough to label teachers, but there is definitely a spectrum of good and bad teachers. This again is entirely subjective and also the opinion of a second-year teacher, but this is my report:

New Teachers- They're very tough to label and are very generally a hot mess. Their quality is difficult to judge accurately, as their success has more to do with the support network they land themselves in than some natural ability to teach the children.

The Good
Green and Eager- I would say I'm probably one of these. The learning curve is steep and they're dedicated. If on the good side they are, of course, headed in the right direction and perhaps one day will be a master teacher.

Solid, Not Entirely Seasoned- These are the good eggs that have stuck around a year or two or three and are developing great skills as teachers. Their management is solidifying, as is their curriculum and they make solid contributions to their staffs. They are not as masterful as those with more experience, but the veterans started somewhere, too.

Entirely Insane, In a Good Way- I've run into a few of these. From throwing lab stools across a room to accidentally blowing petri dishes up and across the lab, these guys can inspire, terrify and potentially teach like no other type of teacher. While not the best role models, it doesn't matter because the vast majority of students want to be nothing like them- they simply learn a lot of great stuff from them.

Well-Seasoned- These folks can be the heart and soul of a school. Masterful, experienced, flexible and at times very quality leaders, they are fantastic examples for other teachers to follow. The ones I've seen are not necessarily in leadership positions, but are looked to as leaders anyway.

Master Teachers- These ones make your jaw drop and drool a bit. With management that wraps entire classes around their little finger, they strike a strong path from day one, hit the ground steaming full throttle and do such a fantastic job that only one of the so, so ugly (see below) teachers would dare criticize them- generally one of those people that criticize others for doing too good a job. If every teaching position was filled by one of these, the Americans would not only be leaders of the free world, but leaders of the universe.

Ancient, Masterful & Growing- In one of the places I taught, the most technologically adventurous teacher was past old enough to retire. He was an expert teacher and still trucking. The year I was there was actually his last, as he took up a teaching position at a major university educating future teachers. Had I been in that state, I would have been lucky to have been one of his charges. He was a master teacher whose days left in the classroom were probably not many fewer than days left in his life.

The Bad
Lost At Sea- Often green, sometimes not, these folks lack directions, whether from their administration or they simply don't have it. Many of them join the ranks of former teachers.

The Bored- These folks, for one reason or another have stopped trying. The students can tell; other teachers can tell; the administration can tell, but for some reason they stick around.

So Angry- Potentially good at their jobs, but so angry at the world and the hand they've been dealt that they cannot deal with other staff, they seem to hate practically everything. I found last year that it's pretty easy to get angry in this field for a billion reasons, but to let it consume you can be to let it tear apart you practice.

Very Bitter and Old- They tell new teachers to beware or simply not to join the field. I met one once that had a PhD in ed, but when she found out that I speak German she told me to switch to business because I could make more money- not very encouraging, nor helpful.

Ancient, Crumbling- These folks are waiting either for retirement or an excuse to leave or maybe even death . They may have stopped growing as a teachers several decades prior and had difficulty switching from the abacus to the computer (their arch-nemeses are the Smart Board and the LCD projector).

So, So Ugly

Absolutely Crazy (In a Bad Way)- These are various. From teachers who can't prevent books being microwaved in a classroom to a middle-aged man prancing around a room of would-be thugs like a fairy-godmother cawing, "No one can steal YOUR education!", these folks need the boot and fast.

Really, Really Bad- This includes the above-listed absolutely crazy and is really just an umbrella term for those teachers that are so bad that any sane stakeholder needs only thirty seconds in their classroom to realize their role in the field should be that of copy clerk (maybe), not classroom teacher.

We all know there are bad teachers out there. It is not a secret. What seems to be a secret sometimes is that there are unbelievably good teachers our there as well. Most teachers in our classrooms are on the Good side of the spectrum, rather than on the Bad or So, So Ugly, but this majority needs reinforcements. The ranks of well-seasoned and master teachers are thinning as more and more of the not entirely seasoned and newbies throw in the towel. The field simply does not recruit a large ratio of applicants to teaching positions. The bottom line, however, is that there are students to be taught and teaching positions to be filled. Principals are often faced with choices reminiscent of too many elections in recent history: the choice between the bad and the worse. Hopefully in the near future we figure out a way to fix this problem, but in the meantime we need to make sure the efforts of those on the "good" end of the spectrum are not swept under the rug.

Until that day happens I'll keep paddling around in my dinghy trying to figure out how to become a master of the trade.


Today's Wine: Tilia Malbec 2008. Yet another from Cavatappo, our friendly neighborhood amazing Italian restaurant. A bit spicy and plenty of fruit.

Hat Friday

A crazy impression I was left with coming out of the school of education was that I was too dignified and professional to do "silly teacher stuff"- costumes, outlandish classroom decorations, etc. Really what I had was a vague idea that teachers needed to be professionals- in my mind that meant they should wear ties every day and not treat the job like some kind of production. Anything "unconventional" was gimmicky to me and perhaps even disrespectful to my students as surely it would be insulting their intelligence to do any of that. The problem was I lumped pretty much everything outside of lecture-based instruction into this crazy-stuff category including loads of hands-on, tactile learning strategies. By the end of the year last year I started to really see the value in making things more tactile for my students, but I didn't really know how to do that in a history classroom.

This year I started small. Instead of transforming and entire classroom into some kind of alternate social studies dimension, I bought a few props, more real decorations for the room and some more tangible, positive incentives that would support the curriculum rather than promote tooth decay. I mentioned the button-maker before, which is a way of keeping academic achievement in front of my students' faces all year. I also used the flags of all countries my students represent to cover my entire classroom ceiling. The idea behind that one was to give students something to connect to immediately in the room and originally it was going to be used for something to do with our immigration unit last fall, but I lost track of that one.

My other major "gimmick" this year was conceived based on the notion that my students destroyed everything they could get their hands on last year. It was actually kind of impressive how much stuff they broke, vandalized and whisked away. Come September I wanted to bring things into the classroom to make history more concrete, but I still didn't trust students not to destroy or steal whatever I brought. It was also impossible for me to carry something around the entire period or stand over it and watch it, as some students last year took any opportunity where I was tied down to something (oftentimes helping an individual student) to start up the mayhem. My response: hats. I figured that if they could connect to it and I could wear it around the entire class period I would achieve all the goals I just laid out.

For every unit I've had at least one hat to wear representing the time period. These are worn on Fridays and I tell students they too can wear a hat in school against the Chancellor's regulations if, and only if, they explain how it relates to what we're studying. So far I've had a Union Soldier hat, hard hat, welding helmet, WWI soldier helmet, paperboy hat, fedora, bowler, a trucker hat with a women's suffrage cartoon on it, a headlamp to affix to the hard hat, a paperboy hat with pieces of burlap stitched to it, a Yankee hat, and today arrived in the mail my genuine American WWII soldier M-1 helmet.

While buying hats, flags and a button-maker might not strike many as ideal kinesthetic pedagogy, it's a big step up from the lame projects I had my students complete last year that generally included drawing stick figures with colored pencils and writing two sentences on the back of the thing. As I move forward with the idea of "living history" I hope to acquire more artifacts of what makes up America and what has made up America. Creating some kind of concrete connection to the material, especially for our students, is incredibly important in helping them to understand it.

Disclaimer: As an important side note, this stuff does cost money. This could be especially burdensome for first-year teachers. Last year (mostly last fall) I spent enough money on my classroom that TurboTax sent up a flag telling me "great job!" I thought that was somewhat telling. If you're strapped for cash you should realize that these sorts of things certainly aren't quick fixes and that you can't buy your way out of a crappy situation. That said, I think it's also unreasonable to expect teachers to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of their own dollars on their classroom in order to make it a place to which students want to come.

Today's Wine: Luigi Bosca Reserve Malbec 2006. We went to a fairly new restaurant called Setlights. The bartender let us try two Malbecs and we picked this one. It was heavier than the other and described by my girlfriend as "warm and cozy."

Holiday Parties

When I started writing this post it was my intention to tell you to take no part in holiday parties for students. This was because the thought of mine last year makes my stomach churn a bit. I was very, very frustrated after a day we tried to give the students who came to school a bit of a break but during which we were handed loads of discipline problems and headaches. What changed was my giving a draft of the post to a fellow teacher in my school who told me how her holiday party went last year.


These are some of the things she said:

In order to have a successful party, or even easy day, you have to have the time be particularly structured. If the students have a positive community and respect for their teacher, celebrations can worthwhile and fun.

We fell down right there last year. We didn't have a structure to the activities we did, only the day itself. Just like the classroom has to be structured, celebration time needs to be as well. My classroom (and two of my teammates') were also not as a rule positive communities where respect for the teacher was to be found.

Students have to see the value in what they're doing. Watching a movie for the sake of watching a movie is transparent, while watching a movie after you've read a book is desirable. The kids know what to expect and have been likely looking forward to watching the movie ever since the reading of the book began.

We showed a movie last year, but we showed it just to show it. That meant "do whatever we please time" to most of the students, which ended in half the students present being kicked out of a movie room for the rest of the day into a detention room that was monitored in shifts, which was less than entertaining for the teachers doing the monitoring.

Holidays are a little different, but I even had a nice holiday party last year. I sugar-coated it as a "Publishing Party" and it seemed scholastically oriented and viable. Since there was a structure to the day, there was a structure to the party and things went off without a hitch.

We tried to teach some small lessons in the morning and show a movie in the afternoon, but even the class schedule was completely different than what the students were used to. By the time the movie rolled around in the afternoon they would have been a little nuts on a regular day, to say nothing of the day before winter break.

You have to have student buy-in. You have to put them in charge sometimes so that they feel what they are doing is meaningful. Have a plate passer-outer and juice-pourer and a napkin-giver. All of a sudden you have an entire classroom working for the party! And THAT is what having a successful party is all about.

Last year I ran around like the waiter I used to be brewing hot chocolate for students, popping popcorn and handing both to the students in the movie room. At this point in the year my trust in the students had been so shattered by their lack of participation and terrible behavior in class that I flat rejected offers to help with handing these things out- probably not smart.


This year I am planning no holiday party. The teachers on my team (two of four of which are new to the school/team) and I are all having some kind of culminating project in each of our classes (mine was today- a rally for modern progressive issues topped off with a few bags of chips), but we aren't going to try to have a grade-wide celebration.

If you're still struggling with management and getting a handle on your class, plan something that's educational, but not incredibly difficult. Stick to all daily routines you have in place. Last year two days before the botched holiday bash I brought in for each of my students two of my favorite cookie and one of those small candy canes wrapped in a gift bag with ribbon. Unlike most of the other things I'd handed out last fall, these were not based on merit or performance or behavior, which meant everyone got one. I can't tell for sure, but the gesture may have been something of a turning point in the relationship I had with those kids. Whatever did it, things started to get better after break.


Today's Wine: Misterio Malbec 2006. This made for smooth drinking and, as is usual with Malbecs (for me), a nice bottle for the table.

Plan Your Time Wisely

My girlfriend asked me today what I did on my planning period. She'd noticed that no matter what I did during it, I always planned my lesson at home anyway. She was trying to tease out of me the fact that I might not use it as wisely as I could.

My planning period is right after my first period class. Last year it was often spent wondering how I could salvage for my other classes a meticulously-planned lesson that had just crumbled away before thirty eighth graders. That sometimes meant rewriting a PowerPoint or scrapping the whole thing and getting something new for the rest of the classes in order to preserve order.

This year when first period is over I first head into the hall and make sure it is cleared. That always takes a few minutes, as I help clear the hall of eighth graders and then of the ninth graders who pass through the same hall after the eighth graders are done passing (we don't have any official passing periods- an effort to reduce incidents in the hallways; students move directly from one class to the next). When that's all over I generally use the restroom and then head to a small science prep room that fits a couple desks and refrigerator. I pull up the detention log for our grade and write down the names of our detainees for the day on post-it notes to hand to the other teachers on my team so they can lasso the rapscallions who owe us time at lunch. From there I make any alteration to the day's lesson plan that need to be made for the rest of my classes, answer any emails that need answering and attend to any paperwork or errands I need to run around the school (talking to the secretary or an AP, making extra copies for my classes after my prep, etc.). Other than those things, I feel like I've been doing a lot of putzing around during my planning this year. I sometimes start planning the next day's lesson, but know full and well that it won't get done during that period, so I'm generally not as focused as I could be. This problem is exacerbated by the knowledge that I haven't taught that day's lesson to most of my students and therefore cannot know exactly what I'll need to cover the next day- I may change my mind about what to teach based on how my students perform on a given day in class.

From now on I'm going to try to get my grading done and entered during my prep period. Up until this point I've been dedicating about four hours of my Saturday to pouring over my students' work and getting an idea of what they have or have not learned in the past week. Grading every day will allow me to more easily catch those who are having issues with an aspect of the unit. It will also hopefully make me more productive during my planning period.

Advice for the First Years- Pick one part of your job that fits into the time you are allowed for your prep period. Make sure that thing gets done every day. Last year after school I retreated to my bunker apartment in Queens and the time I spent there was very unstructured, which oftentimes meant it took forever to get anything done. That's fine if everything gets done, but I should have used the structured part of my day- the time I spent at school- to organize my job and make it easier for me to complete.

Today's Wine: Domaine Vigouroux Gouleyant Malbec Cahors 2007. Lately the reds I've been drinking have not struck me as fruity. This is no exception. It was pretty good- smokey and herby. It hails from the region called the South West of France.

Whole Class Punishment

Something I was guilty of quite a lot last year was punishing an entire classroom of students for the behavior of a few crazy students. When nearly an entire class is in an uproar and you're battling a group of thirty-plus students day in and day out it's hard not to get frustrated, accuse an entire class of being out of line and dish out a group punishment. If you think about it though, it is pretty unfair to punish the students, however few they may be, who are sitting through class always trying to do the right thing, but who are stuck in a room with way too many other students, many of whom are not in the right setting to be academically productive and who tend to act out each and every day in class.

Last year I found myself saying a lot of things like "you all need to understand that there are people out there that will ruin things and you need to learn to hold them accountable." This seems a bit misdirected. In a setting where keeping others accountable is not dreamed of, let alone embraced, punishing the students doing the right thing may only lead to them to acting out with the rest of the class in the future. The students doing their jobs depend on you to manage the class. Whether you do or not is not the issue. You are punishing those students because you are having difficulty managing the class. That's how they see it.

During the day I had an explosion last week I also had difficulty in another class, which was also on the verge of rebelling against silent reading. After trying to have another discussion on why it's important to learn to read non-fiction, a couple students starting goofing off and calling out to the class, ridiculing reading and the teaching methods in my classroom. As I was already irritable, I acted rashly. Instead of doing some role-playing to show what good interview skills are, I made them get quiet and write down PowerPoint slides instead- hardly sound teaching. The kicker was that a student pointed out that it was because of two students that twenty-eight were now having to write a ton of notes instead of doing what I'd planned for them.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't do what you can to help your classes realize their actions affect other students. Keeping a whole class a couple minutes into lunch until they are quiet so that they don't storm out into the hallway and the rest of the school being obnoxious is not a bad idea. I do that on a regular basis and the students then keep one another in check. There might also be instances when in order to preserve order and even safety in the classroom you'll have to shut everyone down as best you can and have them do something that is not very academic. In the case of the SSR near-rebellion, I didn't have much else planned to pull out of my hat to teach interview skills, so I made them write down what those skills are in hopes that some of it would be used. Had I been more calm and collected I would probably would have been able to gain control of the class and move forward with the lesson, but I made the decision to punish the class and then had to stick with it.

Be very careful about punishing a whole group of people. If you're pissed off and not thinking clearly, you may want to hold off on delving out large swaths of detention times and extra work. There are still times that I feel the whole class deserves some kind of punishment, but I'm doing my best not to act on it when I'm angry in the classroom.

Today's Wine: Kaiken Malbec. This one is out of Argentina. I need to pay more attention to the qualities of the wines I'm drinking. I got lazy with this one and simply thought "pretty good!" Perhaps that kind of review is enough though.

You’re Going to Lose It

When I was visiting schools I could potentially teach at in the city I observed a couple classes at a well-respected middle school in the West Village. During the visit I observed a teacher scream at a student in class for perhaps the first time since I was in school. I was disgusted by the behavior. The student then told me how terrible the teacher was and how she was always picking on her. I took the side of the student, of course, knowing for certain that there was absolutely no excuse for yelling at a student in class. I couldn’t even fathom what would drive a teacher to act that way and wrote the teacher off as a bitter, unhappy person individual with anger-management issues.

When I student taught in Germany I raised my voice in one of my classes with a hint of irritation on the very last day I was there. A student was enormously surprised by that, saying, “Mr. Lawrence has never yelled!” It was day two in Bronx when I unleashed my already healthy vocal chords on my class. It was the first time they listened to me in two very long days. I screamed at them as loud as I possibly could, the order to take their seats ripping out of me like I’d never directed speech at a human before. Sure I’d gotten angry at each of my five siblings and my parents and had yelling matches with them. This was different though. I stopped short of throwing things, but barely.

There was a day last year when I’d given the students a project, which they’d been asking for, and it ended with hundreds of colored pencils covering the floor at the end of the day. After reaming them out about it, getting them to pick up several of the pencils and sending them home, I walked around putting chairs up- slamming them onto desks- irate that another carefully planned lesson had been so wholly rejected. Our English teacher at the time asked if I was alright because I was visibly shaking. All I could say was, “I can’t even give them colored pencils!” and kept slamming desks.

There are a thousand things that you can tell a new teacher about getting angry. If you teach in the city you’ll probably hear a lot of them. The important thing to remember is that screaming at the students in the long run is not effective. Yes, it will gain attention and can actually be effective if used properly once a great while. In fact, in order to gain your students' complete respect you’ll probably have to prove to them at some point that you have a set of vocal chords simply to show them you mean business. Be careful though, as yelling at all frequently will make it lose its potency. Students will stop responding and stop listening. It also goes back to the idea that you need to show your students that you are in control of your classroom. If you’re yelling and screaming all the time it shows you can’t control yourself or your classroom, which will lead to even more management problems and probably more yelling.

To cut to the point, you’re going to yell. You’re probably going to scream. You will get so angry that you’ll shake and be unable to speak. There will be days when you go home and “banging your head against the wall” ceases being a figure of speech. When you take the train or bus home some days you'll feel like the last place you ever want to be is back in the school. Remember that you're fighting the good fight and that it will get better. Remember that you chose this field for a reason. Hopefully that reason was the students. If it was, you'll head back to school tomorrow for another go at it.


Today's Wine: Santa Cecilia Malbec 2009. This is a great wine, as agreed upon by three others I shared it with, and I picked it up for less than $10. Couldn't really find a review online for it, other than this one of course.

Here's to Cultural Sensitivity

Today New York City public schools get the day off for Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews. There is such a large Jewish population in New York and there are so many Jewish teachers in the public schools that the city has to recognize the holiday, or there wouldn't be enough subs to go around. Back in Kansas there are many fewer Jewish residents, so few in fact that when I was growing up I hardly realized that things such as antisemitism still existed, as I didn't realize there were sizable Jewish populations left in the U.S. While I can't be certain, I don't think a single one of my students is Jewish. There's also no way I can be certain their knowledge of the holiday, but I would guess that it's pretty minimal.

Today I'm taking the time to run errands and relax a bit. While still getting a few things done, it's important to take time out when it's given to you even at this point in the year. One nice thing about getting the federal holidays and the Jewish holidays off is that you get to run around and enjoy the lunch specials in the city that people with other jobs often get to take advantage on a daily basis. I'd like to chalk this one up to getting to know the city a bit better and thereby improving my ability to teach "local culture."

Today's Wine: Jelu Malbec 2005. This is a decent red, but you can probably get a better Malbec for the same amount of money.

Hiring Freeze Frenzy

Today the New York Times ran an article about the hiring freeze in NYC titled "Amid Hiring Freeze, Principals Leave Jobs Empty." Basically the freeze on hiring means that no one can be hired as a teacher who didn't already hold a teaching certificate last year. I've been pretty riled up about the whole situation and it seems a little common sense would clear it up.

Point 1
New York City has 1,500 schools. Among them are some of the most difficult to staff in the country. Principals EVERY year at this time are scrounging to find decent candidates to put on their payrolls- candidates that will survive the first year in a new school and that will actually teach their students something. There is a reason so many millions of dollars are used to recruit people to work in New York. People are brought from around the world (Philippines, Austria, etc.) to fill vacancies because there are not enough qualified candidates to go around.

I talked just a bit in my previous post about how poor/mentally deranged some of these candidates are. While the union thinks it's protecting its workers by making sure they are given jobs before new hires, it certainly isn't protecting the students. The people who have been unable to find a position for the past year or two probably should never be given a position. These principals are not "quietly defying" the hiring freeze. This is New York City!! If someone is going to defy something like this they'll scream it from the rooftops. These principals are looking out for the best interests of their students by NOT hiring these people, just as they do every year. Pressure is put on them by the city to have a successful school. Who is going to hire someone that has been unable to find a job for twelve months in a city that can't even staff it's schools every year?

There is also some pressure on principals, however morally grounded, to look at cheaper employees. This means hiring younger, less-experienced teachers because their salaries are much lower. This is a problem with the budgets that I feel needs to be rectified. Here's a solution I've bounced around for a while:

Deduct the same amount of money from a principal's budget for every teacher hired. This would eliminate the concern about having to hire younger teachers or forcing older ones out and enable principals to simply hire the best teachers available. Who would pick up the rest of the tab for the salaries of these teachers? Tricky. Principals' budgets would need to be reduced as a whole, presuming they would need less money if they were only paying first-year rates to all teachers. That reduction of course would be highly contended and scrutinized, but if done correctly, most of the schools in the city might benefit.

A problem with this plan: Principals already receive pretty much the same budgets across the city. Some have made it a practice to have a young, slightly less-experienced staff in order to have a few more dollars to buy things like textbooks and computers. The bottom line is that there is simply not enough money to go around. Schools can either have great programs and technology or experienced teachers, but not both with the funding they're given by the state and federal government. The principals who have elected to have younger staffs to afford better programming would take a hit because they would probably lose enough of their budget that they wouldn't be able to afford the special program(s) they offer.

Perhaps this can be offset with grants to inflate budgets, but grants cannot be relied on year after year. If we move that direction in education I fear schools will open and close so often that the idea of "school culture" will be obliterated in the city, eliminating a major incentive for students to come to school.

Easy solution? There is none. Easy to rant about? Sure.

Point 2
Coming out of the school of ed we were all super stressed about getting jobs, understandably. This year it seems like it would be far worse. Because of the hiring freeze, all the people coming out of schools of education are not even eligible to be hired. These students of education did not have a teaching certificate last year and are therefore ineligible. If I had moved this year instead of last year I would have been sent right back to Kansas.

A loophole to this is if you are going through a non-traditional program. Teach for America candidates and New York Teaching Fellow candidates are still being allowed into the classroom without any experience. Regardless of how you feel about the traditional route to the classroom or the alternative routes, I personally think it's a bunch of crap. If traditional education students are worth that little, perhaps we should revamp those programs to make the future educators more valuable.

The hiring freeze, at any rate, as the potential to discourage a lot of eager, great candidates from even joining the field. What kind of message is the Department of Ed and the United Federation of Teachers sending if solid candidates are being rejected while the bottom of the barrel is being placed in schools?


Today's Wine: A Cabernet-Malbec blend at Libertador Parrilla Argentina. Apparently Malbec is oftentimes used as a blending grape, more especially in France, though. This one was from south of the border.

On the Other Side of the Table

Yesterday and today my new team was interviewing math candidates. We had three interviews from incredibly different people, but it wasn't difficult to decide who we wanted. Being on the other side of the table is WAY better than being on the interviewee end, by the way.

I've never interviewed for teaching jobs outside of New York City or outside of the Bronx, so to say I'm an expert on interviewing candidates would be a stretch. When I worked at 65 Court Street my office was in charge of recruiting. I did sit next to dozens of interviews, some with people singing and dancing for our recruiters, some yelling at their interviewer, some very strong candidates who just happened to have a first point of contact with someone at our office, and some whose only contact with a government institution should have been to be institutionalized, not to apply for jobs through the Department of Ed.

Part of that job was also to help with massive career fairs attended by sometimes well over a thousand candidates where row after row of principal/hiring team would take resumes and listen to candidate after candidate in an attempt to find people to fill their open positions. These events were high-stress, generally very hot, full of people who got angrier and angrier (especially as the summer wore on) and wondered why no one was getting a job and no one was helping them specifically. For some these events were life-savers, for many others they were entirely frustrating gong shows that, from what I could tell, could really be run no other way except in an online setting, which wouldn't necessarily be any better. The fact of the matter is that there are only so many positions and generally a lot of people looking for jobs, in spite of general teacher shortages (or shall we say good teacher shortages).

I was fresh off the plane from Kansas during that summer, not really knowing anything about the city and not sure where I was going to want to teach a year down the road when I would be looking for jobs. As one of the fairs was winding down, I was brought into a conversation with a principal from the South Bronx by the Bronx Recruiter, one of the craziest and hardest working employees in the DOE, who was also my immediate supervisor and for whom I was a lackey, assistent and most importantly an intern. This principal was going on and on about the lack of qualified people for her school, which was apparently a rough one. She took one look at me, leaned over the table and said, "No offense, but I wouldn't hire you. You look too nice."

I was of course indignant. Did this woman not know that I had one of the highest GPAs in the School of Education?! Was she aware that I had been substitute teaching in rural Kansas for an entire semester?!

Of course she didn't know. I hadn't told her. What's more is that I knew full and well- in a very textbooky sort of way- that those things didn't matter when it came to teaching the students she was teaching. In fact, they matter very, very little, if at all. From her perspective I was a scrawny white guy, clean-shaven, looked like I was about seventeen and I was quietly listening to the conversation, seemingly very passive. Based on that interaction alone, I wouldn't have hired me in a million years.

As for me hiring people(haha), I had three options: wet-behind-the-ears-guy, the scared puppy and the decent candidate.

Wet-Behind-the-Ears-Guy This guy, according to a couple other people at the interview, was almost a carbon copy of me at the beginning of last year. I agreed, save for the moppy hair and bigger ears. He was slinging post-grad vocabulary, soft-spoken but confident and full of what seemed like good ideas, especially on paper and in textbooks. We thought he'd be an acceptable hire- the students would shred him and we'd help him regain his footing and make it through the year with some level of success (pretty much what I experienced).

Scared Puppy She came from another school in Washington Heights serving a similar population. It didn't show. She answered few questions well, none with complete confidence and was very intimidated by the whole process. Not very becoming of a one-year veteran. Had she been hired, she would have been shredded and would have made it through the year, but she would have been a weak link on our team.

Decent Candidate Sometimes it's hard to describe a good interview (again, I'm not an expert). Sometimes you just know that a candidate will work well with you. This candidate was leaving a job for respectable reasons, lives and works in the community our school is in, and easily answered all the questions we had. Out of the three, the team agreed unanimously to extend an offer to her first. She has the potential to be an incredible asset to our team and school.

Yesterday's Wine: A glass of Malbec at Josie's West in Manhattan. Personally I've never had a glass of Malbec that I didn't like. This one was from south of the border.