The big issues are taking me down out here. I am avoiding the news. I feel like holding up a cross and throwing holy water at the T.V. every time my husband summons Wolf Blitzer into my home. Instead, I retreat to Words with Friends, good books and stashed paint brushes.

I will march on the 24th to add my voice to the cry for gun control, but I just shake my head at the relative who bought an automatic weapon for fear sales will be shut down next month. There’s been a big run on guns that spray bullets in a continuous stream. My relative, his friend, and some random guy got the last automatic weapons in a local gun shop. Never mind that my relative already owns a big, scary, automatic rifle. The waiting period before you can take your spiffy new automatic rifle home is a full 24 hours in Illinois, by the way. You have to wait 72 hours to take your handgun home.

I know who to hunker down with during the zombie apocalypse, anyway.

So for a while, I plan to drop the big issues. Last year I did a series of tips for new teachers. Let’s resume those tips. Admittedly, March seems an odd time to strike out in this direction since you new teachers made it this far. You are probably feeling much less shaky than you did in August. If not, maybe my tips will help.

The following tip is part of a larger concept: You need to hoard classroom minutes. Those minutes are the lifeblood of learning.

Tip #1: Your classroom, your rodeo. You are in charge. Don’t let education school idealism make you treat your room like a democracy. Yes, students should have input. They should help you make the rules so they can have ownership in those rules. Kids push back against excessive authoritarianism and feelings of powerlessness. But even social scientists freely concede that democracies tend to be inefficient users of time. We wait to vote after long discussions and thousands of advertisements, advertisements we evaluate and sort.

One of the first teaching big lessons I had to learn was not to listen too much or too often to attempts to change routines. As soon as rules become negotiable, you will find a pack of future attorneys willing to argue for hours. “But you let us listen to music during the Civil War activity,” one kid will say, and others will then chime in. “Yeah, and music helps me to concentrate.” “Ms. Smith let us listen to music.” “Music relaxes me so I can read better.” “I think we should decide when we need music to concentrate, not the teachers.”

Minutes will always slip away. A student will walk into the room carrying a stack of official letters from the office to pass out and there goes yet another closing activity. You don’t want to freely give your minutes away, however, and if kids think they can change classroom procedures by talking at you — Oh, will they talk!

You may be tempted to say, “O.K. Music is fine,” but that choice will come back to bite you the next day or the day after that.

“You let us do it last week!” “Yeah!” “Please?!?”

Eduhonesty: The rules should be clear. The rules should hold. If you relax the rules, you must be explicit about why that relaxation is occurring and firm about the fact that this one-time exception does not mean the rule has changed. Kids being kids, I recommend relaxing the rules only in exceptional situations, and briefly explaining why you are allowing a change.

P.S. It’s March. Have you relaxed those rules? Maybe too many of those rules? Trying to reclaim your rules at this stage may lead to open rebellion. It’s far, far easier to loosen up than to abruptly get stricter. I’ll address the tricky question of reinstating rules in my next post.

 Her name was Mary Thorson. Her pictures show curly brown hair, light brown eyes, a wide smile, and a button nose. Her bronzed complexion hints of African-American ancestry. Mary stepped out in front of a semi-truck. This 32-year-old teacher who taught in Ford Heights, Illinois, left behind a six-page suicide note, mostly about her job. While looking up her half-remembered story, I stumbled upon a Chicago English teacher, Joseph Hillebrand, who had stepped in front of a Metra train.

Mary had served honorably for eight years in the Army Reserves, but her position in a small, impoverished school district proved so stressful that she chose suicide by semi on a major Illinois expressway. Reading between the lines, her stress seemed mostly to be coming from problems with administration, and other teachers reported administrative bullying. Mary had already been suspended once from her position after allegedly striking a student,  a gesture she called a “playful tap”, and she would be suspended again the week before her death for cursing at a student, according to a coworker. 

Yet Mary was a caring teacher. In a district where more than 98% of students were classified as low income, Mary used her own money to buy school supplies and even warm clothing for students. A fellow physical education teacher said her students loved her and “gravitated” toward her.*

Toxic work environments in education have become big news in the recent past. I remember the Brooklyn teacher who faked a fall down her school’s stairs to avoid a poor performance review. I have held crying colleagues devastated by those reviews, especially after Illinois, like other states, decided to rely on the Charlotte Danielson rubric to judge teachers. Suddenly, many points were in play, and performance was boiled down to numbers, many of them made up, since no one can assess twenty-two areas of expertise by watching one person for an hour or less.

Mary Thorson was expected to go home for the holidays on the night of Thanksgiving, Nov. 24, 2011. She never made it. Instead, the police showed up with the saddest news any parent can receive. I am sure there have been no happy Thanksgivings since that tragic day.

Eduhonesty: What if Mary had been carrying a gun? She would have been an extremely plausible teacher to arm with her eight years of honorable military service. That semi-truck became a weapon of opportunity. What might she have done with a gun instead?

I fell in my school parking lot years ago. I still remember a coworker’s loud, plaintive shriek, as she came over to help me up: “Why couldn’t it have been me?!!??” If she had fallen, I am sure her teaching years would have ended in that parking lot that day. She was nearing the edge, the throw-yourself-down-the-stairs edge. I just got up and dusted myself off, a lucky fall onto the ice in my long, thick, down coat.

Here’s my take on the arm-the-teachers plan. If we do, I believe one of those teachers tempted to throw herself down the stairs will shoot her Principal instead. Or she will shoot the students in her afternoon English class, the ones who made fun of her when she tried to introduce the new project that she had cut sleep to prepare the night before.

According to Fast Facts from nces.ed.gov., in 2015 the U.S. had over 3 million public school teachers. Pick any group of 3 million people and you will find a number who are overdue for mental healthcare, a number who are taking the wrong meds, too many meds or none of the meds they have been prescribed. Even men and women who have always shown solid mental health unravel sometimes, unable to manage after a family death or an unexpected affair and divorce. Add to that the fact that teaching can be an extremely high-stress job, especially in poor and urban districts trying to hit unrealistic test-score targets. Let’s throw in the factoid that around one-half of public school teachers quit within the first five years, unable or unwilling to do a job for which they may still owe many thousands of dollars of student loans. That figure gets bandied about regularly, although I am not sure it’s up-to-date. The number may be higher today.

If even a fraction of fraction of 1% of those more than 3 million teachers lose their temper while armed… The body count will rise swiftly. And all those nifty new locks we keep installing in schools across the nation? Those locks will be useless.

Some of the sanest people I know have ended up seeking out mental health care in times of crisis. Others simply crumbled. They crawled into bed and came out months later, when they came out at all. Being a teacher in no way guarantees mental health. Nothing guarantees mental health.

If we arm our teachers, we will be meeting a new enemy — and that enemy will be us.

P.S. This post ignores one other aspect of arming teachers that requires at least a mention. That football player who once pushed me out of a doorway because he was bigger, stronger and determined not to let me slow him down? What if he had decided to go for my (then-nonexistent) gun instead? As we add guns, we add to the risk that students will gain access to these guns, accidentally or deliberately.

*http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2961

I watched the President and Secretary of Education as parents and children of gun violence pled for saner laws and limits on access to firearms. Where are those laws? The current situation would be utterly absurd — if it were not heartbreaking. I went into an elementary school where I sometimes substitute last week and was asked to put my car keys in a box until I returned my substitute I.D. at day’s end. I am familiar with this procedure from other schools; subs do sometimes walk off with those I.D.s which may have room keys and even keys that open the school. It’s easy to forget about the “necklace” that is a school’s lanyard.

But this request was new. Shortly before the Florida shooting, a small elementary school in a quiet community had added a fancy lock to the interior office door of the school. I could only get in or out of the school office via the already-secured front door or by scanning a key in the back of the offices. I learned how to use my new key.

Eduhonesty: My problem is not security. My problem is I think I may have bypassed that security the last four out of five times I went into a school. I sometimes wince now as people let me past that security, and I may start gently reminding the helpful that today’s security exists for a reason. So many people obligingly hold open doors for me, no doubt because I look like a teacher with my Yoda bag bulging with papers. Sometimes I carry an owl or Avengers bag. I reek late middle-aged teacher and I always have sensible, flat shoes and glasses. But who knows what’s in my many stuffed bags?

Profiling works for me. People let me into schools all the time, not always through the front door. Students let me in. Teachers and other adults let me in. Especially on freezing winter days, people take compassion on me as I trek through parking lots and around schools. Not all of these helpful folks have seen me before.

Readers, the next time you see that woman with her Yoda bag? Please, make her follow procedures. The stakes have become too high to take chances, even the tiniest of chances.

My next post will be about arming teachers.

Drop-out numbers provide more evidence for the U.S. achievement gap when broken down, and hidden in those numbers is a Dreamer fact that seems to escape many of our nation’s leaders. Our schools are teaching Dreamer children, the sons and daughters of undocumented workers facing an uncertain future. These children, like all children, only bring so much hope and resilience into the classroom. The amounts vary. Some kids can ignore the reality of their daily lives almost completely while happily planning to be part of the first Martian colony. Others take more prosaic views of their lives, however, and believe what older siblings and adults tell them.

“You can’t be a nurse. You don’t have a social,” big brother says. (Short for social security number.)

“You can’t be a teacher. They are going to make us go back to Guatemala anyway,” big sister says.

That “social” is an especially big deal. Without that magic number, many occupations are effectively closed to Dreamer children. Factory or yardwork jobs are possible, but any position that requires a background check is pretty much off-limits. Almost all college loans require that social, too, although a number of colleges and universities are running their own loan programs.

Dreamer children easily lose hope, and often at a young age. I have watched many slip away from me in middle school, using their Dreamer status as a reason and sometimes an excuse for the studying that never happens and work that never gets turned in. Giving adolescents an excuse not to work will always be a loser. Giving them no reason to dream is criminal.

The Hispanic dropout rate always comes in highest when we look at government charts, despite the fact that many of these children come from intact families with a solid work ethic. Mom and dad may be working three or four jobs between the two of them. For the year 2015, the U.S. government estimates 4.6% of whites dropped out of high school, 6.5% of blacks, and 9.2% of Hispanics.*

We might pause to congratulate ourselves that the gap between whites and African-Americans stood at only 1.9 percentage points in 2015, down from 6.2 percent points in 2000. But if we want to see a similar narrowing of the gap between our Nonhispanic White and Hispanic students, we will have to address the challenge of those Dreamer children, the ones who do not see the point in finishing high school because they don’t believe 1) that they can afford college and 2) that college will allow them to realize the dreams they once had, before a realistic friend or family member explained how that “social” number worked.

*https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_219.70.asp?current=yes See also https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16

We use cooperative learning to group students so that stronger students can teach weaker students when the differentiating teacher is busy scaffolding elsewhere in the room.  If we have the resources (teachers often spend their own money or try for crowdfunding options), we split into different groups with different books – when allowed. Administrative demands for grade-wide, comparable data may force the use of one book and one set of materials so that all tests and quizzes throughout a grade can be measured against each other. Data, data, data.

Our children are not data. They are children. Considering the costs of gathering data, we should be asking if the informational benefits received warrant the extra effort and lost time that result from all those spreadsheets. What was wrong with report cards, the data of the past?

Among other considerations, let’s be clear: I don’t need 25 spreadsheets to tell me that “Sadie” can’t read. I figured that out the first time I sat down beside her and listened to her try to read.

That new, tougher curriculum resulting from those new Common Core standards? It’s sucking up existing teaching hours like a raging river adding water to a flood. Meetings, professional developments, retooled lesson plans, lost students, unfamiliar books and software… Time bleeds away as teachers take this latest shift in focus and make it work.

Here is what I observed while teaching that curriculum: Remediation is getting sacrificed to idealistic learning targets, while the students at the bottom of the learning curve only become more confused. Making existing content more demanding without offering adequate time and resources to teach missed material from earlier years means students who only understood a fraction of what was coming at them daily now understand an even smaller fraction than before.

Eduhonesty: Let’s step outside the above verbiage. Kids don’t grasp why they suddenly understand much less of the curriculum than they did the previous year. They just know they fell from the upper-middle of the state standardized test to the lower-middle a few years ago, in one deep, ugly, PARCC or Smarter Balanced plunge, and somehow they cannot get off the bottom.

In concrete terms, we are making whole groups of capable young people feel dumber than rocks.

Spoiler alert: This post discusses the movie. It’s also about education but you have to travel through Star Wars to get there.

A friend and I have been debating Luke Skywalker lately. She feels that “her” Luke would never have become the curmudgeon living alone in the seaside cliffs of that distant green planet. He would always have been part of the fight for justice. He would have responded right away to Rey’s plea for help except, of course, that plea would never have been necessary. Luke would have been standing at his sister’s side.

To me, Luke’s isolation and bitterness make perfect sense. What has the Force ever done for Luke? The trail of bodies began with his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru and grew to include many of his childhood and later friends, eventually even Han Solo. He lost one arm while learning that his childhood boogeyman was his father, and reclaimed that father only on his deathbed. He learned that heroes could skew the truth — hell, outright lie — from “a certain point of view.” His attempt to train young Jedi led to the death of many of his own protégés and the defection of others, and the emotional loss of his only nephew, Ben Solo.

“What has the force ever done for Luke?,” I said to my friend while we were debating our different Lukes. “Why wouldn’t he retreat to a distant planet and decide to let the world fall apart without him?” I added a few examples from Luke’s life to support this view. Then I added the phrase that suddenly pulled me right back into teaching in a school that had been taken over by the state, back into my own life.

“You can break people,” I said.

Eduhonesty: I know you can break people. They broke me. I retired. I sit in a comfy blue room where I write and blog. I even teach some days, mostly half-days, because I never stopped loving teaching. I just stopped being able to put up with the constant put-downs because my bilingual students (gasp!) could not read the mandatory seventh-grade Common Core tests they kept failing — tests that all students in the grade had to take whether they were bilingual, special education, or “regular” students so that the administration could compare teachers. I did badly, of course. The inability to read the test (combined with my unwillingness to cheat) guaranteed I would do badly.

All that effort, all that time, all those kids I genuinely loved… I felt as if it was being swept away that last year I worked as people demanded I teach four years of material in one year, while simultaneously attending meetings many mornings and almost every afternoon. I was so relieved to retire, to go find my own version of a cottage by the sea. I can work as hard as anybody I have ever met, but I can’t work batshit crazy.

Maybe this blog is my own astral projection, the last shreds of energy and love for kids being sent out into the battle I can’t fight anymore.

I could not help Johnny. I talked to his mother. She told me that she worked in counseling and her son was fine.

I changed his seat because he was talking nonstop to one of his few friends. He refused to move. He made weird noises at odd times regularly, mostly to disrupt the class, but sometimes I think he just had to emote in guttural moments of fear. He accused other students of bullying. “Mick called me fat!” he would say. (He was skin-and-bones thin.) Mick denied the accusation. Johnny kept saying, “No!” when asked to do daily work.  He made his class tense and other students complained. In these times, weird noises can be scary noises. The bullying issues became complex. How much of what Johnny said was true? I knew much was not — Johnny lied even when I had been standing right beside him — but kids pick on weak kids, and Johnny was building an image of weakness, bit by bit with random noises and odd behavior.

I sought help, but Johnny could talk a good game. His mother and the social worker did not see the problems I saw. Johnny knew all the psych words. I was not sure if I was watching this boy unravel or not. Maybe he was playing a game, messing with his classes and students’ heads for fun.  My take was Johnny was scared, and in response had launched himself on a mission to disrupt his classes.

Other teachers reported similar problems. They got no further than I did. I think Johnny might have been waiting for one of his teachers to rescue him, but he could always explain himself. He had not meant to blurt out that word or sound, he explained earnestly. He was sorry he had refused to … whatever — and there were a lot of whatevers.  He could talk about emotions and behavior glibly, almost professionally. I suspect he had been reading his mom’s books and magazines.

Eduhonesty: If outsiders want a glimpse into the stresses and struggles of teaching, this snippet may help. Across a few years, I can still see and hear this kid. I hope he is doing well in high school. Not all middle-school emotional dives end badly. But I also want to note that this one kid made a whole class nervous, except for a few friends, and I could not solve the problem.

You had to be there. You had to hear him. You had to watch his face. But outsiders did not see him or hear him, except through the carefully funneled channel of innocent, youthful, “Oops! It was an accident.”

So many accidents. So little time between those accidents. Everything could be explained. Everything was explained. To my knowledge, Johnny never got help. He managed to slip through the cracks.

I don’t know what to add, except this: Moms, dads and guardians — Your kid’s teacher has seen many, many children. When he or she calls you repeatedly, please don’t dismiss concerns with a quick, “He’s fine at home!” I never doubted he was fine at home, in his comfort zone with his loving mother. He was not fine at school, however, and he was building a reputation for weirdness that he will be years putting behind him, if he ever manages to escape that reputation.

“In fact, the research that shows benefits from class size reduction finds effects that are smaller than most people realize …”

The above quote was taken from Education Myths by J.P. Greene. Greene goes on to say that smaller classes would require too much funding, taking away from other possible reform efforts.

I read Greene’s words and thought that he had captured a snippet of the mess that is American educational research. If researchers could truly control for classroom conditions, I suspect they would find a large effect from class size — in certain populations and specific classes. In districts that historically have sent the great majority of their graduates on to college, class size mostly will not matter since upwardly-mobile students have their eyes on the prize. They do their homework and fight for grades they expect to be reviewed by college admissions counselors. When those districts are included in class size studies, they can be expected to take attention away from schools where class size may make all the difference in academic achievement.

The class size picture in financially- and academically-disadvantaged districts remains murky, but I would like to observe anecdotally that class size has sometimes had a big effect on my teaching life, depending on the class. I found that increasing my math class size from 19 to 24 students caused little disruption. Increasing my high school Spanish class from 28 to 34 (originally 40!), however, was a game changer. Suddenly, behaviors were impacting instruction to a much greater degree. Suddenly, I had firecrackers in bottles in the back of the room and gang symbols etched onto desks.

Research unsurprisingly shows varying benefits from smaller class sizes. Teasing out exact benefits remains impossible, due to variations in teachers and class compositions, among other considerations. I had two of those large Spanish 1 classes, and one was much better behaved and more academically centered than the other. That one class was almost no trouble. The other … Well, I took a day’s absence once, worried about my sub, and when I called to check on him, found the poor fellow’s voice was shaking and the police had been called. (In fairness, a student from the special education department suffering from behavioral disorders had taken advantage of my absence to sneak into the class, where he yanked a girl’s hair hard enough to set off a series of reactions. My students probably would have done fine if not for the unknown marauder.)

Eduhonesty: It only takes one student. Classes of thirty-five students can be easier to teach than classes of 20 students, depending on the students within those classes, one reason why studies on class size keep finding anomalies that researchers struggle to explain. A small group of disaffected kids can keep a large group from learning. The wrong buddies become a teacher’s bad luck. A quick catch may allow a teacher to change schedules and separate Kyle from James at the beginning of the year, but most of the time the best and only option will be a well-designed seating chart that may not work during projects, gallery walks and other group activities.

My problem with educational research can be captured in a snapshot by Greene’s words as he attempts to debunk an idea that ought not to be debunked. Class size matters. I’ve walked the walk that Greene minimizes, and it’s no stroll through a sunny park. While the class size problem cannot be reduced to reliable and exact numbers, dismissing the impact of class size in urban and academically-disadvantaged schools helps no one — not parents, not teachers, not administrators, and most especially not students.