This tip’s meant for newbies, but people who have changed schools or administrators may find the tip useful as well.

From my last post:

*In practical terms, you genuinely should avoid airing all the laundry in front of the administration, but your coworkers should be mostly “safe,” especially if you ask for help and advice. Experienced teachers expect to help colleagues get started.

I can’t leave these two-sentences of advice dangling at the end of a post. Administrators are like bit players in a Star Wars movie. By temperment and character, some are greedy shopkeepers, some are surly bartenders, some are embittered former Jedi knights, some are Rebel fighters and some are Imperial Stormtroopers. You may not always know what you have, too. Those administrators can be tricky.

Especially be careful of new, young or desperate administrators.

Put any administrator in a potential turn-around school in the desperate category. Put any administrator whose job depends on improving test scores in the desperate category. Desperate administrators make desperate moves in order to hang onto their jobs. Getting rid of “substandard” teachers looks good to higher-ups in the district office — whether you have truly sub-standard teachers to fire or not.

The problem with new and young administrators can be a lack of understanding of “normal” school conditions. If Maribeth taught in a prosperous, middle-school district with great test scores, but took her first administrative teaching position in your urban school with its 39% drop-out rate, Maribeth may have no idea what she’s doing — but she may not realize that fact. If you come at her describing too many problems, she may decide you cannot manage a classroom — a classroom that she herself might be unable to manage. But she won’t necessarily realize that fact because historically her own classes always went well.

Admin may claim to want the best for you. They may act like your friend. They may even be your friend. You can’t trust that friendship, however.

If the administration decides to get rid of a few teachers to show that they are addressing the problem of lower test scores, you want to be invisible. Too many requests for help can translate into too much trouble managing a classroom. I watch a colleague lose her job in her second year, very unfairly in my view, in part because a group of middle-school girls had put her on the radar. I loved the principal responsible, but I still think my colleague lost her job because he needed a “sacrifice” as the state closed in on my district.

Eduhonesty: Get help from colleagues, not your administration. Watch out for colleagues who are too buddy-buddy with administration. Watch out for colleagues who share too much gossip in the teacher’s lounge.

Tip # 15.5: Ask for as much useful professional development as you can. The best help sometimes comes from outsiders, and requesting professional development always looks good. Share the best parts of that development with other colleagues who did not attend useful seminars with you.

Tip #15.6: If admin asks how you are doing, the answer is “Great!” A small question here might be indicated, especially if you are in the Dean’s office with a student, for example. You might tack on something like, “I do need to work on keeping Fatima and Sarah on task, though. I have already separated their desks and called home. What else would you do?”

Asking for a few pieces of administrative advice should help you to make a good impression, provided you make sure that administration understands that, overall, you are doing “Great!”

P.S. Obviously I am overgeneralizing here. The best administrators I ever knew were working in challenging environments. You may have nothing to worry about. I’d follow one man who worked in desperate times to Mars. He was a wonderful leader. But in this time when schools have been known to use the numbers in the Charlotte Danielson (or other) rubric to decide on teacher retention, letting administration know that you are struggling with small groups may lower your evaluation score and final average. I knew someone who was let go for getting a 2.7 when her district required a 2.73. These are crazy times. I’d say, better to be safe than sorry until you have been in your position and worked under your new principal for long enough to know the lay of the land.

If you have no English-language learners in your classrooms, you can skip this post.

I have had colleagues ask me to make Spanish-language phone calls and I do not hesitate to help. I know sometimes calls get dropped because busy colleagues cannot make themselves understood and are unwilling to impose on others. New teachers may be afraid to look bad. Older teachers may simply wish to respect their colleagues minimal and often steadily decreasing planning time. As meetings and data work suck up that planning time, the time becomes more precious and Mike may not want to impose on my remaining twenty minutes of “free” time.

But if Lupita is skipping class, that phone call home must be made. If no one at home speaks English well enough to converse over the phone, you need help. New teachers, please don’t worry about airing your laundry in public * … in front of colleagues. We have all been there. We know how tough that first year can be. If Miguel cursed at you and called you stupid, his parents should be told immediately. Little transgressions become bigger transgressions when they are not addressed. Miguel also needs to know you care. Showing an interest in him may make your whole year much easier.

So ask me to translate. Ask the school secretary. Ask any teacher, counselor, social worker or clerical staff member who speaks Spanish or another language you require. At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, I’ll observe that the most grateful parents I have ever called tend to be those new arrivals to the U.S. who have not yet mastered English. These parents often feel excluded and lost as they navigate officialdom around them; they love to be included as vital elements in their children’s educations. They crave the chance to know what is happening outside their homes.

P.S. If you wanted to buy your “translators” a small Starbuck’s gift card, bunch of flowers, a latte or some token of gratitude at the end of the year, that effort would be appreciated, especially if a colleague donates hours of time to help you with your classes.

*In practical terms, you genuinely should avoid airing all the laundry in front of the administration, but your coworkers should be mostly “safe,” especially if you ask for help and advice. Experienced teachers expect to help colleagues get started. Oops, I believe I just stumbled into a useful new post.

Yes, that last post has a true Blog of Gloom and Doom feel. If I call home I may have to call child services? I may be attacked? Oh, no!

Hi, newbies. These tips continue veering to the practical, but I feel I should add some perspective to the previous post. Most calls home are harmless and many are beneficial. Parents have helped me hold up the ship and rescue their kids for years. Parents are usually grateful to know what their child is doing in the classroom. They want to know Arianna has fallen behind in her homework. They want to know Arianna skipped class and disappeared yesterday afternoon for two hours. Sometimes they desperately want to know.

Parents are mostly grateful for help and information. They can often get the homework done and see that Arianna comes to class. So, please, plan to call parents and guardians when you have a problem unless those red flags referred to in my last post crop up in some fashion.*

Eduhonesty: Calls to parents and guardians at home can help enormously when you are trying to manage your classroom. I wholeheartedly recommend calling regularly.

Tip # 14.5: Keep a call log. Update that log while you are calling or immediately afterward. (I have had a bad habit of planning to do this later and I am sure some calls never made the log.) Write down phone numbers to simplify future calls. You will find some numbers are used often. You may have them memorized before Thanksgiving break.

*If you sense possible trouble or conflict from making a call, consider delegating that call to a social worker, counselor or colleague who has a better rapport with your student’s parents. While sometimes you may be the only person for the call, depending on the nature of that call, there’s no disgrace in asking others for their expertise.

Education classes and school administrators encourage phone calls home. Theory favors parental involvement as an element in educational success. Administrators want that open channel between parents and teachers.

That said, this advice comes from years of calling home. I’ve made a few phone calls I regretted. I’ve made more than a few useless calls, and one or two that bit me back. I still believe in calling, but I am more careful about those calls now.

Are you a new teacher? If so, depending on your background, I may have a warning for you. Those books and articles about not spanking kids? Those books and articles are read by readers. Not all your students’ parents will be readers. In some cultures, spanking remains commonplace. When you decide to make that phone call home, the person on the other end of the line may have a very different value system than your own. Keep in mind that you may precipitate a level of punishment you would not use personally. I’ve had parents give me verbal permission to spank their kid. When I told them I could not, they immediately promised to spank the kid for me if I called.

And when a kid seems off-the-charts messed up, I always try to keep in mind that his or her parents may be part of the problem. I am not saying that parents are necessarily the reason for challenging classroom behaviors. I taught a delusional child a few years ago with loving parents who I’d guess had little or nothing to do with the voices in his head. Still, I am not going to call that home without knowing more about my student’s background. Angry, bullying kids often come from angry, bullying homes.

Years ago, a seventh grade boy with a reputation for bullying came into my classroom early. I was tired and I’d frankly made a mess of my eye make-up putting it on in the dark*. He looked at me sympathetically: “Did your husband hit you, Ms. Q?” he asked casually, as if this were a regrettable but common occurrence.

Tip #13: If a kid breaks into tears and says, “Please! Don’t call home! They’ll beat me!”  I recommend listening. That’s a call I’d pass on to the social worker, after I discussed the comment with the social worker. That’s also a kid to watch. Teachers are mandated reporters and you may find yourself needing to call child services at some point.

In general, I recommend waiting on calls until you are no longer feeling upset or frustrated with your student. Be sure to add a few good points about the student as part of any conversation. Those conversations should be versions of, “He’s very enthusiastic and energetic, but that energy is making it hard for him to stay in his seat.”

Eduhonesty: Some of those calls will be no-win scenarios, too. Try not to let those calls get you down. At some point, you will call “Felipe’s” house about his behavior and his mom will go straight to the attack, asserting that if you were a better teacher then Felipe would be a better student. If you knew how to manage a classroom, Felipe would never have squirted hand sanitizer on Olivia’s back. Some parents fight for their kids with a complete disregard for the facts. I suspect nearly every teacher who calls home has heard a version of, “I can’t believe that. You must be wrong. He never does that at home.”

*That might have been the last time I put on make-up while sitting at stoplights in the dark. That year, I had to leave for work at 5:00 AM because of my commute.

This year’s tips have taken a turn for the practical. Last year’s tips — I recommend new teachers visit last August and September in particular — were targeted mostly to new teachers and revolved around getting started in teaching. But as I try to write a book out here and think about my experiences, I am beginning to mix a more eclectic flavor into the 2016 offerings.

Readers, how do you like your green beans? I’ll bet no one out there answered, “Cooked for hours until they are mushy and kind of gray-green, preferably without salt, butter or seasoning.” Yet that’s what many schools are feeding their students. The new food guidelines came in and the butter, salt and cheese sauce went away in many places. The chips vanished. The vending machines were turned off until after school hours. I have vented about these lunches before, with their six ounces (tops) of baked chicken, unseasoned rice and mushy vegetables. Student then get to pick small carrot bags or apples to add to their trays.

Some schools are still serving tasty lunches. I learned that while subbing last year. A district with money can work within the guidelines and come up with tasty sandwiches. For that matter, some schools are still serving pizza and ice cream. Maybe they don’t need federal funds. I never asked.

But getting circuitously back to my tip: I have watched mountains of food thrown away. I have commiserated with the custodial staff as they cleaned up around the overflowing garbage cans. In a previous post, I believe I even recommended that schools seek out pig farmers to see if they might want feed donations.

Here is what I want to recommend to teachers: If Joaquin or Shaniqua are throwing away their lunch every day, call home. A free/reduced price lunch is no lunch if the kid never eats that lunch. Talk to mom, dad or whoever gets the kids off in the morning. Suggest sending a bag lunch to school in this situation. A cheese sandwich with a boxed apple juice will be better than no lunch at all. Heck, a butter sandwich with a Dr. Pepper will be better.

Too often today, kids are eating no or almost no lunch at all. Their trays get dumped after a lunch period spent socializing and cadging chips off some friend who brought food from home. These hungry kids predictably become tired, listless and cranky.

If your school serves those green beans, check with your students about their lunch habits. Do they eat? If they don’t, please step into the gap and help find food for them.

P.S. Middle school and high school teachers may never spend time in their school cafeterias. If you don’t visit the cafeteria, you might create a survey on lunch habits instead. I know what I am suggesting adds to a probably already huge workload, but the improvement in the behavior of your sixth, seventh, eighth etc. period classes should make those phone calls and rewards worth the time. By 2:30, hungry and cranky can turn into ravenous and raging. Full moon or no, the werewolves start coming out.

In part, the new Common Core standards and the current push toward Core-aligned PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests have come as a natural response to America’s historical apples and oranges testing situation. I am sure data wizards have been scratching their heads for decades as they tried to compare Mississippi students to Maine students. Without common tests, that comparison cannot be made, and in the old days when states devised their own tests, no overarching, statistically valid comparison between states was possible. Among other considerations, the Common Core was developed to standardize data between states.

I would like to pose a few questions, though. Do we need Mississippi and Maine to be comparable? If so, why? How do our students benefit? How do our schools benefit? Once we answer these questions, we need to ask and answer the most important question: Will the expected benefits from data standardization be worth the enormous costs from retooling the U.S. educational system, especially since no data thus far suggests that the new standards will actually solve our most critical problem — the large disparities in learning between more and less fortunate zip codes?

If standards are not the problem — and no proof exists that our previous standards created our current educational inequalities — then the enormous time, money and effort that have been sunk into the Core and changed tests have essentially been a diversion, stealing resources from students who have fallen behind, a diversion created for the sake of “better” data.

Data should not be determining our instruction. Our students should be determining our instruction. Specifically, a child testing at a third-grade level in mathematics should not be immersed in seventh grade mathematics because he happens to be thirteen and we want statistically comparable test scores for all of America’s thirteen-year-old students. That student should be receiving intensive mathematical instruction designed to pull him up through the elementary curriculum as quickly as possible. He should also be exempt from time-sucking standardized tests that he cannot do.

This little shoulder bag simplifies teaching life greatly. Today’s post repeats from last year I believe, but my old, gray bag follows yesterday’s phone post perfectly. Besides, we have many new readers who most likely have not scoured the entire blog. Kipling makes this bag with its two zippers. I like having three sections. The top section fits almost all phones, at least so far. In a few years, you may need a beach tote for those phones.

Guys probably don’t need the bag, although anyone who wants to go to school in his kilt and sporran has my total support. I back your right to use a man purse, too. But guys are lucky enough to have pockets. Designers of men’s clothing seem to understand the need for pockets.

Women’s clothing often omits any helpful pouches. Even sweaters and jackets may not have pockets. If you always drape the little purse over your shoulder at the start of the day, you can skip the problem of, “Oops! No pockets again.”

You want to keep your keys and phone on your person. You may want other phones on your person. Having a few markers and maybe reward coupons stashed in the bag helps. These little bags make every day easier.

P.S. A colleague of mine who taught special education actually had a car stolen and totaled by a middle student some years ago. Students have also been known to stash keys in clever places as a “joke,” one that almost no teacher ever has found funny.

Phones. Oh, phones. How much time do I spend playing Words with Friends? Going through random mail? Playing (more) Words with (more) Friends? Flashing over to Facebook? Checking Yelp for Thai food? Looking at orange and red Google roads?

I understand how seductive phone time can seem. At this point, for that reason, I strongly believe teachers need to keep phones out of the classroom. No good comes of letting these little bundles of gaming and internet connectivity into the room. Students will point out academic uses for their phones, but no academic use exists that compensates for the time loss from texting, gaming and surfing.

Students can work with real calculators. They can use classroom technology to search for information on the internet.* They can even use books.

Relating back to my last post, you don’t want to let the worms into your classroom, right? Well, the phones have worms. They have jewels, footballs, candy, tanks, soldiers, and even nuclear weapons. So no phones. No mercy, either. Let one phone in, and pretty soon the phones will reproduce. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be hiding in pockets throughout the classroom.

Eduhonesty: IMPORTANT phone advice. Do not seize phones unless absolutely unavoidable. If you must seize them, keep them on your person. Depending on school procedures, hand them off to administration as soon as possible if allowed. I have seen colleagues accused of damaging phones or losing/taking phones that disappeared. If the whole class sees where you stash the phone, someone may take advantage of that fact.

Guard your own phone and install password protection. I still remember trying to help a colleague find her new, expensive birthday present. Sadly, she never did find that phone.

*In the absence of classroom technology, especially when other resources are scarce, phone usage becomes considerably more complicated. I have let phones into the room in that situation.

Pic from https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/iLI15g8PtD6X_cRuaEMnevCHJ9vQ4maMm3PnXJf8I5FTur4j1of-DGoHjs65FIS273s=h900

For the newbies and those new to technology in the classroom:

Before I get to phones, I want to return to the worms in the last post. It’s easy to let a worm go. It’s easy to say to yourself, “Well, Jared finished his work and we only have two minutes left. Let him play the game.”

Beware of worms! Watch out for those moments of kindness. You can’t let the worms gain a foothold. As soon as you let Jared play the worm game, the laptop next to him will go to that URL. Pretty soon everyone will fall under the spell of the worms. Then they will start asking you, “Can I play the worm game? I’m done with my assignment.” They may even try to bargain with you. “If I finish the  homework for the week, can I play the worm game?” The problem will begin to grow larger. “Why can’t I play “Droid Attack? You let Matthew play the worm game.”

If you are not careful, your classroom may begin to resemble Tremors #6: The Worms Eat Ms. Q’s Classroom. Worms will gnaw on your lesson plan and swallow your reinforcement activities whole. Minute by minute, you will be battling worms, droids and other time-sucking creatures, all intent on stealing your class time.

If you have ever watched a lavalantula movie or that classic Big Ass Spider, you should know the key ingredient to managing cyberworms: You can’t let them reproduce. If you do, there goes the plucky heroine’s best friend — and most of your students with her.

I’ve had some fun, but the idea behind this post was quite serious. A minute here, a minute there, and soon whole hours will slip away. If you want to use the worm games as rewards, the terms of that reward have to be clearly spelled out with penalties for infractions.

One major help as you add technology to the room: Set up your classroom with your desk in back so you can see what’s on student screens in front of you.

http://www.clipartlord.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/explosion6.png, Quotation from Star Wars 4: A New Hope, sourced from a favorite site, http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000002/quotes:

Han Solo: [sounding official] Uh, everything’s under control. Situation normal.
Voice: What happened?
Han Solo: [getting nervous] Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?
Voice: We’re sending a squad up.
Han Solo: Uh, uh… negative, negative. We had a reactor leak here now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Large leak, very dangerous.
Voice: Who is this? What’s your operating number?
Han Solo: Uh…
[Han shoots the intercom]
Han Solo: [muttering] Boring conversation anyway. LUKE, WE’RE GONNA HAVE COMPANY!

Our problem has never been lack of standards: Before the Common Core, we were awash in standards. We were drowning in standards. A few years back, my district and many others were creating “power standards,” a subset of the complete list of standards for each grade and for each subject. These power standards represented the state standards that the district decided were the most important standards, since there was no way to teach all the state standards. In poor and urban districts failing to make test targets, “power” standards tended to be picked based on a bang-for-your-buck on spring test scores. More affluent, higher-scoring districts had greater discretion, and could pick their power standards based on what they hoped students would know in the long-term.

A huge issue was raised in my last sentence, one still flying too often below the radar. Listening to the news, one might think America was suffering from a large educational reactor leak, very dangerous. It’s not. In many zip codes, we remain absolutely competitive internationally. These districts do not need the reformed standards and tests that keep coming at their schools like Imperial Storm Troopers. They pay a great deal less attention to the implied threat of those tests and troopers, too.

The negative effects from America’s testing barrage are impacting our poor and urban districts far more fiercely than they are impacting higher-scoring, financially comfortable districts. Administrator turnover in academically strong districts remains considerably lower than in disadvantaged counterparts, allowing these already-stronger schools to develop cultures and stability while they work on whole-child education. I taught a middle-school Spanish maternity position recently where students are sometimes excused from class for band and drama activities. In the low-scoring district from which I retired, students were never excused for nonacademic reasons. In the last ten years in that low-scoring school, six principals came and went (one great guy stayed four years until a government grant forced him out) at the head of that district’s middle school, and I may have missed one from the start of the decade. During that time, in contrast, my maternity-position school had exactly one principal.