You Might Think That Being a Blogger in a Niche Industry with a Readership of 50 Pays the Bills.....

....but, sadly, it does not, even for an eerily prescient man-of-the-future like myself. Some thoughts, then, from the job that pays my bills: teaching first grade!

• I had a biiiiiiiiig blowup earlier this year with the LASER science coordinators from my ESD. I'm getting trained in one of the kits for first graders, on solids and liquids, which requires three days out of the classroom. Given that I had a student teacher at the time, not a big deal.
  
  The big deal comes, though, when the training......is.......ass. The presenter skipped around from unit to unit with little cohesion; instead of getting the "big picture" of what the kit was, we instead got little snapshots of the things that she found cool. It was the exact sort of training that I despise, when someone who hasn't seen the classroom in years is doing a poor, poor job of trying to tell me what to do in the classroom, so before my sarcastic, antagonistic side could take hold and say something regrettable, I left.
  
  The next day my principal gets a phone call. Early on in my career that would have scared me; now, not so much. At the end of the saga the two main science ladies from the ESD ended up coming out and meeting with teachers from my district to talk about why LASER isn't working, and my most fervent hope given our ongoing budget crisis is that I can pull us out of the whole damn co-op entirely.
  
  If your district is considering LASER, run the other way. Madness lies down that path.
  
  
• I've got this kid in my class, L. Energetic, 7 year old boy. The problem is that I've yet to find his soul.
  
  I like my classroom to be a happy place where the kids are engaged. There's a certain amount of noise, but that's OK--I have to look a little askew at those teachers who always manage to keep their classes silent, because that's not the natural state of the primary-age child. The trouble with L, though, is that he can't handle any freedom, at all, and I haven't found his motivator.
  
  We started positive: do the right thing and I'll play a game with you. Do the right thing and you can choose to use the computer during recess. Do the right thing and you'll earn a sticker, and those stickers can be traded for points. Do the right thing and these great things will happen.
  
  He didn't care.
  
  We went negative: do the right thing, or you'll miss recess. Do the right thing, or you'll turn your card. Do the right thing, or you'll have to sit by yourself during lunch. Do the right thing, or I'm taking away everything in your desk.
  
  He still didn't care.
  
  The kids I struggle with the most are the kids who don't respond to anything. Positive, negative, whatever--they're going to do what the hell they want to do, and they don't care what you think. They have great fun at school, because there is no consequence that you can offer that will make them stop and think about what they're doing. That's how L is.
  
  The other problem I have with him is the pervasiveness of his behaviors. There's never a break; he's always up to something. It's kids like him that can ruin a class faster than any other, because when you have a class of 24 and you have to invest 80% of your effort into one child, the rest of the kids aren't getting the attention they need or deserve. For the struggling academic students, they're not getting the one-on-one time they need. For behaviors it's worse, because kids who could be stopped at step one are usually three or four steps down the line before you can catch them, because of the effort you have to put into the one.
  
  I had never done this before in my 8 years of teaching, but I went to my principal and asked her to move the kid out of my room. We don't have a relationship worth salvaging, so there's no concern there, and in a different room with less kids, maybe he can succeed. I hope so, for his sake.
  
  
• The problem with having a tough class is that you can redirect those negative emotions the wrong way, if you're not thoughtful about it. Wednesday morning I had one of those moments; the principal had emailed to tell us all to come to a staff meeting, and that staff meeting was going to start early because there was so much to go over. I leave for work early, thinking about what I'm going to do with the kids the entire way, and set up the room a little bit before heading down to the staff meeting....
  
  ....which turned out to be a surprise breakfast put on by the Social Committee.
  
  "This is it?" I asked. "This is why we're here?"
  
  "Oh yeah!" replied the 6th grade teacher at the door, cheerfully passing out door prize tickets.
  
  I think the look on my face gave her pause.
  
  "....but you don't have to stay if you don't want," she quickly added.
  
  I didn't stay very long.
  
  I think part of it, sometimes, is being the only male staff member in the building. The things that sound really, really great to the girls, all 49 of them, aren't all that interesting, sometimes, to the one guy. Thank God for the custodial staff, at least.
  
  
• I'm kind of obsessed with the state budget. As president of my local I'm at the intersection of a number of different special interests: the Uniserv, the WEA, my principals, the district office, my teachers (all 130 of them), the community writ large, the media, and more. With my district looking at a potential $700,000 hole, I'm worried. My goal is to avoid layoffs at all costs, because any teacher released into this economy isn't getting hired anywhere else anytime soon, but the district budget can only be sliced so many ways before my people get hit.
  
  That's probably going to be my biggest project this spring. The worst thing that could happen--the absolute worst--would be for the legislature to run long, because then the district would almost have to layoff people. At one point Senator Zarelli out of Ridgefield in SW Washington said that he thought there was a chance it could not get done until June, and that would be devastating. Stay tuned.

And for all the readers out there, thank you for sticking with ITAT, and I wish you all a wonderful holiday season!

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Say WHAT!?!?

Education Week recently ran an article about how ed schools are adding more classroom management training to their teacher prep programs. That’s good, because a teacher who can’t manage their kids isn’t going to be a good teacher. If you’re going to be interviewing for a teaching position, know with 100% certainty that you will be asked your theory of classroom management. If you blow that question, you’re not going to get the job.

This little bit from the article really floored me:

At the University of Cincinnati, a mandatory classroom-management course has been built into each teacher education program since 2000.

Wow, since 2000. The only way that’s OK is if they started the program in 2000. How the hell can you put a program together and not have a classroom management class included? Oy, vey.

Were I a college professor teaching a 4 credit classroom management class, here’s some of the principles that I’d follow:

*Required texts: The First Days of School by Harry Wong, Tools for Teaching by Fred Jones, and Classroom Management that Works by Marzano and Pickering. Each come at the question of what works in the classroom from a different angle; Wong on routines, Jones on relationships and structure, Marzano with actual instructional practices.

*Class activities: Case studies. Lots and lots of case studies. What do you do about the kid who has a chip on their shoulder? How do you manage all the paperwork? What should your lesson plan for a week look like? There’d be an awful lot of discussion, too.

*Tests and Papers: The final would be a term paper asking you to define the most important pieces of a good management plan, and explaining in detail how you would implement those in your classroom.

The more skills we send new teachers into the classroom with, the better off they’ll be. It’s not a cure-all, but it’s a start.

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With Great Power.....

I'm pretty hawkish about the right to free speech. It's what makes America great, and I firmly believe that the vibrancy of our culture is directly connected to our tradition of any idea being able to get out and be heard.

That said, I detest those that abuse the right. Just because you can doesn't mean you should, and when the uncreative defend saying outrageous things as an exercise of the first amendment my heart breaks. Case in point:

Two students in northern New Jersey can wear buttons featuring a picture of Hitler youth to protest a school uniform policy, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Joseph A. Greenaway Jr. sided with the parents of the students, who had been threatened with suspension by the Bayonne school district last fall for wearing the buttons. However, the judge added in his ruling that the boys will not be allowed to distribute the buttons at school.

"I'm very pleased," said Laura DePinto, mother of one of the students. "I think it upholds the most basic of our American rights, which is to protest peacefully."

Citing a 1969 case in Iowa involving students who wore black arm bands to protest the Vietnam War, Greenaway wrote that "a student may not be punished for merely expressing views unless the school has reason to believe that the speech or expression will 'materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school."'

Greenaway's decision "follows the law as we saw it going in," said Karin R. White Morgen, an attorney representing both boys' families. "We believed that it was the Tinker decision that applied," she added, referring to the Iowa case.

The buttons bear the words "no school uniforms" with a slash through them superimposed on a photo of young boys wearing identical shirts and neckerchiefs. There are no swastikas visible on the buttons, but the parties agreed that they depict members of Hitler youth.

Bayonne instituted mandatory uniforms last September for grades K-8, and fifth-grader Michael DePinto wore the button several times before objections were raised in November, attorneys for the plaintiffs said.

In a letter dated Nov. 16, 2006, Janice Lo Re, principal of Public School 14, notified Laura DePinto that her son "will be subject to suspension" for wearing the button in school.

Parents of the other student, Anthony LaRocco, a seventh-grader at the Woodrow Wilson School, received a similar letter from principal Catherine Quinn.

After the suspension threat, the boys' parents filed a federal lawsuit claiming the district stifled the children's First Amendment free speech rights. They also have mounted a legal challenge to the uniform policy.

These parents should be ashamed of themselves.

Exercising your free speech is great--it's an American tradition, after all. When you run right to the Nazi analogy, though, you're not only being uncreative, you're also being a thug. The Nazis were responsible for the deaths of millions. Some of the most horrible things that man has ever done to man were done under the Nazi banner, and to suggest that there's a direct correlation between a school uniform policy and those who perpetrated the Holocaust is repugnant.

The very act of invoking the Third Reich makes this a non-peaceful protest. There are legion others ways that these kids could have expressed themselves; shame on them for not choosing a way that would have given the message more respect.

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