The beginning of the last school year — my first school year as a full time teacher — was marked by fits and starts. Our meetings started today, and I got to talk more with a number of the new teachers. Some new to teaching, some new to my school.

Can I say, phew!

It’s such a relief not to be in that position again. Getting used to the school argot, learning and promptly forgetting the quirks about the school’s operation, struggling to fill out medical and retirement forms, and firing a mountain of questions to everyone around you while hoping that you aren’t annoying anyone. A totally overwhelming experience. Phew.

It’s kind of fascinating to think back to that time, though. In the first weeks of school, there were huge and small obstacles that I had to overcome. I often didn’t know the difference.

For example, in my school, each teacher signs up for a couple “duty periods” a week — where you proctor a study hall or sign kids out when they leave campus for lunch. I signed up for my duty periods, and then — way late in the game — realized that one of the duty periods I signed up for conflicted with my 10th grade adviser meeting. I freaked out. Full stop.I felt so anxious about it that I sent an email to this faculty list-serve we have asking if anyone could switch. (No one responded.) And I remember being just terrified and anxious to talk to the principal and tell her I had screwed up.

And looking back — even as soon as the day after it was quickly resolved — I realized that I made a mountain out of a molehill. It was a five second fix, and 72 hour freak out.

A second example: in my first two weeks of teaching, I was doing work in my apartment late one night, and realized I didn’t have the teacher’s edition of my Algebra II book with me. I swore I brought it home, so I tore apart the whole apartment. (You know, one of those frantic and desperate searches where you even peek in the freezer, because there’s that minuscule chance that you (a) opened the freezer door looking for a popsicle, (b) put the textbook down in the freezer while you reached for the popsicle, (c) closed the door with the book in the freezer, and then was (d) struck with temporary amnesia where you forgot that you went to get a popsicle and left the book in the freezer.)

I was so freaked out about this missing book that I hopped on the subway and went back to campus to check. At this point it was like 10pm at night and I was dead tired from all the work I had been doing. Plus the subway comes much less frequently at that time.

The book wasn’t anywhere. I returned home, dejected, and I tried to fall asleep. Thoughts kept running through my mind: had someone stolen it? Could I have put it anywhere else? Will everyone think I’m irreponsible?

The next day, after considerable querying and looking like a fool, it turned out one of the other math teachers had simply borrowed it and returned it in a different place.

I now know that losing a book — teacher’s edition or not — is not a huge deal.

More than not being a huge deal, these things weren’t even blips on anyone’s radar. I had made yet another mountain out of a molehill.

The problem was that at the time, I didn’t know what the school culture considered a mountain and what the school culture considered a molehill.

I’m glad I am familiar enough with the school culture so that I know when I can just say “whoops, oh well, time to move on,” and stop worrying. And honestly, almost everything I obsessed about last year were the small things.

This year I know I won’t be sweating the small stuff. (As much.)

Draw whatever conclusions you may, but my favorite movie growing up was Anne of Green Gables, the series with Megan Follows broadcast on PBS. My sister and I taped it from TV and watched them over and over and over again. With the recent $10 windfall that befell me (and another $40) I bought the DVD collection.

Tonight, while watching the second DVD, I came across this gem, which I encourage you to watch the first six and a half minutes of:

Argh! Embedding on that video is disabled. If it doesn’t show up, watch it here. Trust me, it’s definitely worth watching. [The transcript of the scene is below the fold.]

Let’s lay the basics out here. Anne Shirley has been a teacher for the past two years at her hometown’s public school. She enters a private school where the cards are stacked against her. And this is the first day of classes.

What we see here is something we teachers fear, something we cringe when we watch. An entire class turning against us. We know this deep down: in a battle with students, students always ultimately have the upper hand. And in this clip, we see that laid bare.

Anne and the student ringleader escalate their conflict — each egging each other on. Anne offers a punishment, sees it isn’t viewed seriously by the rest of the class, and raises the stakes. The student says, simply, no. (The student can always say no.) In frustration, Anne raises the stakes again: administering the strap. In a voice of defiance, the student accepts the punishment. The battle of wills is over. The punishment wasn’t a punishment at all, because even though it might have hurt, the student won the battle of wills. Anne lost.

If you care to answer, I ask you: A majority of students in your class are rallying against you, the ringleader lets out a snake and admitted it, and then refuses your punishment of staying after school for a week. Your school does NOT have any formal school-wide system of punishment (such a detention, suspension, expulsion). You have to handle this on your own. What would you do at that moment in class, in front of your students? How would you have diffused the situation and gotten the class into your corner?

Transcript of the scene below the fold.

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The mentor teachers put the new teachers in Teacher Boot Camp through a crazy hazing exercise. We had spent some time talking about classroom management. Then they sent all the new teachers out of the room, and called us in one-by-one to tame an unruly classroom.

I was first to go.

I walked in and one of the students had his cellphone playing music, talking lip to me, while another one was sitting on the desk talking loudly across the room to his friends, one had a nerf ball they were playing with, and others were just talking. It was scary. I failed. So I was sent outside of the classroom and asked to come back in to try again.

The same scenario, but this time I took the music-blaring cellphone away, went to the board, and put on a math puzzle, and laid down the challenge to the students. They were hooked. The “no nonsense get to work” approach.

So I passed The Test, and I got to transform myself into one of the unruly students. In each round, as each new teacher passed The Test, there were more and more unruly students and it took the new teachers more and more time and more and more creativity to settle everyone down. Each had a different technique (shutting off the lights, trying to reason with the students, counting aloud). But we unruly children also planned various scenarios for each new teacher to encounter.

My favorite: One girl in the room was in hysterics because her boyfriend cheated on her. There were four other girls comforting her. The boyfriend was in the classroom, taunting her. And then the new teacher walks in. Crying, yelling, the girl’s friends shouting at the boyfriend, and so on. Horrifying.

My second favorite: A new teacher walks up to one of the unruly students named Jose. “Good morning Jose, I’m Ms. [X].” Jose replies, not skipping a beat, “Why do you think my name is Jose? Is it because I’m Puerto Rican?”

Truly classroom management hell.

So the new teacher program I referenced in my last post is in full swing, and I was not wrong about it being chalk full of stuff to do. I’m ambivalent about the usefulness of this program. I think I’ll probably get some good things to take away, but I’m not sure if the cost-benefit analysis works out in my favor. (We have “classes” until 5, and then projects and homework to keep us busy until 10 or 11pm. Remember that I only had ONE day of vacation since school ended before I had to come here.)

There was something that disturbed me about the program’s take on technology yesterday. And I now see why people like dy/dan are cautious about the school 2.0 crowd. When introducing technology, two mentor teachers took on the persona of 30 year old fogey veterans, who were “not okay with this passing fad of technology.” And we were supposed to try to convince them to come over to embrace technology.

Us: “Word processers are great! They allow you to spell check things, write faster, and edit and create multiple drafts quickly.”

Them: “Word processers are a crutch. Students don’t know how to spell anymore, and when they revise, they just change a few things instead of truly revising.”

What disturbed me was that everyone seemed to buy into this dichotemy. Instead of taking seriously the pitfalls of technology, the variety of teaching styles, and the fact that many veteran teachers with a lot of experience can teach amazingly without technology (with just a piece of chalk and a blackboard behind them), it was all an us versus them thing. The mentors were caricaturing the veteran teachers, making them look like they were wrong for not embracing technology. [1]

The focus on embracing technology wasn’t seen through the lens of student learning, and that’s the rub.

Give me a 30 year old beloved teacher without a Smartboard who has honed his (or her) craft anyday. I wouldn’t say no. [2] And how many of us have had those kinds of teachers, and loved them, and learned a lot from them?

[1] I finally read Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” in this program, and I was disconcerted. But everyone I talked to seems to buy into it wholesale. I wonder if the teacher mentors do too? Do people actually buy into this? How serious is Prensky? Not that all of it doesn’t sound plausible, but if you’re going to be arguing for a wholesale revolution in how children ought to be taught, I need a hell of a lot more evidence than the evidence provided. To me it sounds like the plausible argument “there’s so much violence in America because there is so much violence in movies.” Plausible, but I’m not buying it without evidence.

[2] Not that I think a teacher — veteran or not — can go through life oblivious about the technological world around them. But certainly we can’t and shouldn’t force anyone to embrace it.

Although school is over for my students, it isn’t over for me. I am doing what I have come to affectionately term “New Teacher Boot Camp.” Its official title is “Collegiate School Teaching Institute” and is a two week program (weekends included!) which focuses on skills for new teachers, as well as getting new teachers acclimated with aspects of teaching particular to independent schools (such as comment writing, for example).

Before attending the boot camp, each of the participants was asked to read and review Theodore R. Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer’s book The Students are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract. My review — surely still with typos and needing a good proofreading — is below the fold, for anyone who is interested. The one thing I didn’t put in the review, but which I couldn’t help but notice as I was reading this book, was how well my school conforms to the Sizers’ view of a good school. The thoughtful and reflective community (we often — sometimes to my chagrin because we do it too much or badly — talk about the core values of the school and how we can enact them), the attention to making each student feel like they are part of the community and respected, the emphasis on community norms and collective decision making (such as having a student-faculty judiciary committee or inviting students to be on hiring committees), the knowledge that each student has an individual learning style (the learning specialists are central to the running of the school and not a peripheral department; we write narrative comments on each student twice a year), and so on and so forth. No one would claim that it is a perfect school. But at least in terms of how the Sizer’s see things, I think they wouldn’t bite their thumbs at us.

Again, review after the jump. My opinion of the book below is very likely (read: almost certainly) going to change after I get to discuss this with the other participants in the program.

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I started this post a long time ago (maybe two or three months ago), but scrapped it. But I’ve decided to finish it up and make a little plea for advice at the end.

What do you do when you ask a question and get a totally wrong answer? Okay, this question screams newbie, but it happens to me enough and I often get caught in an awkward situation. Let me explain.

A completely made-up but not unrealisitic example:

Me: So we now we have this: . Where do you think we go from here? What are we trying to do again? StudentX?

[Context: We’ve learned how to graph quadratics, use the quadratic formula, complete the square, factor, and seen equations like this all year. It should be second nature to them. And for many it is, but for some it isn’t. The problem is this: we’re way beyond this. We’re working on some other concept, and these gaps force me to veer away from the current lesson and take a bunch of steps back to reteach these things to the few that don’t get it…]

StudentX:  Um… well, we could add 2x to both sides…
Me: [awkward silence while I think of what to say, because I don’t want to do that…]
Me: At every step, we want to ask ourselves: (1) why do we do that? and (2) what are we trying to find out? So why would we add 2x to both sides? What are we trying to do?

[Context: Even when they are on the right track, I will ask this question. I want them to think about every move they make.]

StudentX: I don’t know.

At this point, I’ll ask what type of equation we have, and what we know about it. StudentX will finally get it (“quadratic!”), and we’ll move on.

Sometimes I don’t make it a drawn out process. If I’m in a rush, I will ask if someone else has a different idea and call on someone who I know will have the right answer, and then move from there. And then I’ll return briefly to the original idea and explain why it won’t get us to where we want to be.

But this interaction takes 3-5 minutes, I know 80% of the students in the class are bored, some are trying to whisper the answer to the student, and we get held up.[1]

Of course, I’m all about meeting students where they’re at. And I’m happy to review. But these moments happen all too often, and using every one of them as a teachable moment takes too much time and would be bad practice. I have a curriculum to cover. Taking three steps back constantly is tough.  

That tension, between moving forward in the curriculum and making sure students are up to speed on the older stuff, is palpable. 

I often feel like I sacrifice the majority of the class when I do too many of these types of things. I don’t want to praise a wrong answer (“That’s a great idea, but I’m not sure it’ll help”), I don’t want to scare a student from speaking in class (“No”), I don’t want to spend a lot of time on a basic skill that the rest of the class knows, I don’t want to make the student feel dumb or ignored (“Anyone else have a different idea?”).

I’m afraid I’ve done all three.

To make this into a truly teachable moment would require me to add 2x to both sides, and then stick with the student and ask them what next. And just stick with them until they see that they’re stuck. But I tend to only go down really wrong paths in math when we’re learning something new and we have the time to have these dead end explorations.

Basically, when it comes down to it, I recognize that I still don’t know how to organize and manage a differentiated classroom well, how to scaffold lessons, how to keep everyone engaged and learning, while still moving forward in a fast-paced curriculum. It’s not that I don’t try. About 30% of my students have some learning difference or another, and I do think about that when I’m designing my lessons. I do. But what I’m doing isn’t working. At least not as well as I’d like.

I think that in addition to classroom management, this is one of those big topics that doesn’t often get explicitly addressed in teacher blogs. Maybe that’s because a good many teachers do it without thinking about it – it’s natural. But even though I do a lot of things naturally well, planning a scaffolded lesson for a pretty differentiated class isn’t one of my fortes. Yet.

So anyway, if you know of any blog posts or websites, or have any advice, holla out in the comments.[2]

Yeah, I know, I know. Everything about this screams “Newbie.”

[1] One of my fears is that I’m going too slow for a bunch of my kids, and I’m not sure where my focus should go. The middle of the road? Those that don’t get it? Those that do? For me, I think a complicating factor is that I was always one of those kids who did get it, and really quickly. I identify with them. I don’t want those kids to be bored. And I feel guilty because I am pretty sure they are bored.

[2] Five or so years ago, I read about differentiated classrooms in one of my teaching classes, but the readings were all academic mumbo jumbo with no connection to reality. I’m looking for something useful.