“Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

~ Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Eduhonesty: If I want to keep my job, I can’t exactly follow Mark’s advice. I am likely to lose my job if I fail the number of students who deserve to be failed. So I won’t. I like my job. But some of these kids would be better off if I did not offer them so many chances to recover their grades. What I am teaching them will not help them when they actually go out and get a real job. Schools give fourth or fifth or twentieth chances. Bosses don’t.

When I was in kindergarten, they taught me my right from my left. We were always facing what I then thought was West (It was actually South. My guess is my teacher had been a bit confused herself when teaching directions). For years afterwards, I had to face West in order to figure out where “right” was because I wasn’t entirely sure if “right” was the same while facing other directions. I did not want to ask for fear of appearing stupid. I would just turn to face the appropriate direction. I had a pretty good intuitive sense of the compass which would later help me while driving. I think I was inadvertently teaching myself to orient myself in space, all in search of this mysterious thing, “right” and its equally odd counterpart, “left.”

A few simple questions would have made my life so much easier, but as I got older it seemed impossible to ask those questions. I could not handle the possible humiliation.

Eduhonesty: I’m betting lots of kids in my room have those questions stocked up but are too afraid to ask. I hope at some point they’ll trust me enough to let me make their lives easier. Pride is a powerful force, though, and it messes up many of us.

Middle school girls often start the year academically ready and eager for the year. Then the hormonal balance goes haywire. Suddenly they start to drift. They are not looking at me anymore. There eyes are focused on some skinny kid across the classroom. They giggle a lot. Sometimes the boy looks back at them. They giggle more. Their brains have gone tharn or thither and attempts to get them back capture their attention only for the briefest moments.

Eduhonesty: Our boys and girls would do better in single-sex middle schools. There are days when I am tempted to hang a sheet across the room. I am 100% certain that “Catrina” would do better if the possible objects of her affection were behind a dark, king-sized curtain.

Sometimes my knee’s a bit twingy. One good part of my job is that I can sit or I can stand. I can walk around the classroom. I have a lot of physical freedom depending upon how I script the day’s activities. Teaching works well for people who don’t like to sit. I’m probably a better teacher for my restlessness, too. Even as I try to keep students seated, I am able to feel compassion for those who struggle to stay with the program. I try to work breaks into the routine that let students get up and move around a little.

What’s a teacher to do when her students ask if the government is secretly hiding alien invaders in Nevada?

“Not that I know of,” I reply, and then note that if the cover-up is a carefully-crafted, big secret, of course, we would not know.

I don’t want to encourage conspiracy theories. I already have girlfriends who are afraid to take trains. But if we are trying to stimulate critical thinking, I can’t shut down this line of thought. The idea that “you can’t prove a negative” may be pseudologic, but how can I say that the concept of stashed aliens is absurd? I can’t prove that the truth is not out there, buried in some underground bunker in Nevada, so I just do my best to offer the facts and probabilities as I perceive them.

In the end, they are looking at me as if I am a possible part of the conspiracy, wrecking their fun. They want secret government cover-ups. They seem to want aliens.

Eduhonesty: We need more Nova episodes and fewer Cupcake Wars.

Standardized tests are normed on “regular” students.

Eduhonesty: This ensures that our lower-performing students in poor and urban districts — or anywhere else for that matter — will get their asses kicked by these tests. No other result is possible. “Regular” or “average” students set the difficulty level of the test, with the intent that these students will fall into the middle of the test distribution. Lower students then must fall to the bottom.

No bully on the playground could come up with a better plan for making a kid feel like a loser.

I love my students. They are so much fun sometimes. But getting them to walk in an orderly fashion to lunch might as well be herding cats.

“Single file,” I say to one girl.
“This is single file,” the girl answers.
I explain that walking next to your friend does not qualify as single file.
She smiles at me and sidles a bit to the right, closer to her friend.
“Single file,” I repeat.
The girls smile and give in, one moving behind the other.
But if I shift my position in line and go back to work on another chatty couple, the girls will return to their original positions, like cats jumping up onto the counter when their human walks out of the room.

Eduhonesty: Perhaps we should eliminate a few rules. Who cares if they go single file? No teacher in this school is winning the single-file game. Some are losing much more dramatically than I am. It seems best not to impose rules that are difficult to enforce when so little benefit is derived from good results.

On the other hand, these hallways were genuinely unsafe a few years ago. The rule is serving a purpose. Surely, though, we can find a medium between single-file with no talking and throngs of random students caroming off one another like starving, lunch-bound bumper cars.

My room is filled with notebooks packed with recommendations from professional development seminars.

These notebooks have far too many good, not-so-good, and just-plain-silly pieces of advice. We need less professional development. It’s not that I haven’t picked up useful, pedagogical tips along the way. I have been impressed by a number of seminars I attended (and utterly unimpressed by others) and have implemented strategies suggested to me.

Eduhonesty: We need to remember that professional development often comes out of instructional time. America would be better off if teachers had more time to get ready for their classes. America would be better off if fewer substitute teachers covered classes while teachers learned for the 10th time about the Common Core Curriculum. I’ve been attending seminars on the Common Core for awhile now. Enough already.

The information I need is pretty much all online anyway.

We are adapting to the attention spans of our students. Can’t work for twenty minutes without playing a videogame? We’ll find you a computer game to teach you math. Can’t read for 15 minutes straight? Some educational theorist will advise schools to break instruction into 10 minute sound bites. Lecture is becoming less and less fashionable, replaced by strategies designed to help students uncover information for themselves.

Eduhonest: Damn, education can be nuts nowadays. How are students supposed to uncover what they don’t know? Teachers are told students need to go online to research topics. But sometimes students don’t have the vocabulary to understand the on-line explanation.

From Wikipedia: “A volcano is an opening, or rupture, in the surface or crust of the Earth or a planetary mass object, which allows hot lava, volcanic ash and gases to escape from the magma chamber below the surface. On Earth, volcanoes are generally found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging.”

It’s tough to read the above if you don’t know what rupture, crust, planetary mass object, lava, magma chamber, tectonic plates, diverging and converging mean.

Students also sometimes have trouble uncovering and sharing what they DO know, or at least expressing that knowledge to one another. As Student A tells Student B that stars are dust and rocks that are on fire, a teacher has to figure out how to intervene in this latest think-pair-share gone awry. Since that teacher has maybe 30 some students, many of these scientifically novel explanations will go unchallenged.

Eduhonesty: Maybe we should try to force the little nippers to sit in their seats, take notes, and actually focus on the material. Sitting and taking lecture notes is good practice even if it’s not fun. Students should not be providing instruction. They certainly should not have to figure out important portions of their curriculum for themselves — at least not in elementary and early middle school.

You can’t build skyscrapers with toothpicks.

I don’t know where resilience originates. I don’t always know it when I see it. But I know that in our poorest schools, resilience can prove to be essential to success. Those kids who lack this magical quality seldom triumph over poverty and instability, seldom manage to fill in their educational deficits.

Eduhonesty: We spend too much time looking at instructional techniques and not enough time looking at the kids themselves. We need to learn why some 2nd grade readers will slog through 5th grade books and others just stuff that book in their locker. I can cite a few factors that obviously matter, but I can also find kids along the way without school supplies, computers, quiet places to work, or even available, supportive parents, who nonetheless regularly blast their way through their schoolwork with enthusiasm.

My questions:

1) How can we cultivate resilience?

2) How can we protect the resilience of those students who are still in the game despite all the odds against them?