"We've had about all the help we can stand."

It's PD season in schoolworld and I've written a fair bit about my professional development experiences through the years, so I thought I'd review my thoughts and see how they match up with what many of you are going through (based on the descriptions some of you have shared on EX). Unsurprisingly, I see things haven't changed much. First in a series.

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

We've had about all the help we can stand.*

Experts. 

The word itself makes my skin crawl. In my twenty-five years in the classroom, I must have sat through a bazillion "professional developments" and trainings conducted by people who didn't understand the classroom and often knew less about the topic of the training than I did. I'm sure many all of you have experienced similar frustration.

It wasn't actually horrific during my first few years. We all met in the auditorium and everyone, including the bosses it seemed, understood the performative nature of these meetings and we got through them together. As quickly and painlessly as possible. While grading papers. Once in a blue moon you might look up and say to yourself or your neighbor, “Wow. That could work.” Then you would take a few minutes figuring out how to use it.

Then, I think it was about 2000 or 2001–that would make sense–the faculty was suddenly offered the opportunity to create a matrix of PDs that would carry through the year, address our concerns, and be conducted by our own expert teachers. It was awesome. 

We dedicated two department meetings to making a schedule and in the third meeting we were told the deal was off. Back to the dictated meetings, only this time the bosses would be taking them seriously.

It was all downhill from there with more and more time dedicated to testing and whatever the latest brainchild of "Downtown" might be. And testing. 

We got more and more consultants and program preachers of one kind and another, and instead of being able to ignore them and do the work we were paid to do, the work that wanted to do--even the grading, sort of--we were now watched, monitored like prisoners in the yard to make sure we were there in the correct spirit. 

Meanwhile, our spirits were low.

Terrible experts who knew nothing about how their concepts would work in the classroom, nothing about the actual thing they were trying to fix, nothing about teachers and nothing about kids. 

I take that back. They all knew that teachers were the problem.

It was around this time that I remember starting to read about the profession and all the things that were wrong with schooling. All these articles by think tanks and foundations, by researchers, by economists and politicians and "thought leaders"--anyone but teachers.

Articles written by people who have never worked in a school. Articles full of interviews with people who have never worked in a school. These people have ideas about everything!

They have ideas about testing and standards and what the curriculum should and should not be. They have ideas about classroom management and teaching reading. They have ideas about class size and educational technology and how expensive school is. They have ideas about our pensions.

They have ideas about unions. They have ideas about school choice. They have ideas about the teacher shortage.

And they have power. They flood the zone with their essays and reports and studies that reflect their specific agendas and those of their funders. Do a Google search on topics like teacher pensions or school choice and the first ten or thirty results will be from one of these experts giving you their slant, and creating impression that theirs is the one true way to think about it. Look up one of their organizations and try and find information about them that doesn't come from them. They are a well-funded, committed bunch.

From the numbskulls that used to come to a room full of English teachers to offer advice on quick writes, to the motivated thinkers suggesting that the problem right now is too many teachers, it's no wonder that teachers continue to feel that their experience, intelligence, and expertise are not valued. And just try and ask a penetrating question or propose an answer that conflicts with the program of the day.

I write all this because I'm feeling it right now. As I've been looking at what Big Thinkers are saying about the teacher "shortage." As I'm now researching what some educonomists are saying about teacher pensions. These people have ideas.

Anybody who is or has been a teacher knows what is true and what is not. We are the ones who have asked the questions and dug deep to find real answers.

I can't help but think that we've had about all the help we can stand.

*h/t John Sayles, Matewan

requiem for the sports pages

I want to take just a moment to mourn the passing of The Sports Pages.

I've been reading the sports pages since I began reading for myself. Dick and Jane and Spot were okay for school. Dr. Seuss was great. Tom Swift was good if you had the time. 

But the sports pages were a refuge. In the world I was growing up in, filled with war and protest and assassinations and riots, the sports pages made perfect sense. Everyone played on the same field and I had no idea that it hadn’t always been that way.

One of the beautiful things about sport is that there's a clear winner, a clear loser, and practically nobody dies. The stakes are momentous and pretend. Tomorrow is another day. We'll get'em next year. 

The sports pages I read just for me. 

You could picture any batter and any pitch. You could track the triumphs and struggles of your favorite players and your favorite teams. Like magic, you could have a seat at any game in any city. 

I read the articles if they were good and I had the time. But the real bedrock of sports pages were the standings, and the box scores that told their story. These precious little rectangles of tiny text were safe places to go and live inside a world of numbers and names that generated images at once familiar and exotic. They could take you to the game--any game--in an instant.

The sports pages make perfect sense because of their unequivocal clarity. A baseball box score is a wonder, containing the story of a particular game and the narrative of a season up to that moment. I’d pick through walks, hits, and look for how batting averages moved up or down. Then I'd shift to the standings to see how this single event had helped or hurt my favorite team as they tried to beat out rivals to the playoffs and--hopefully--the World Series. 

Later on I would discover football box scores! and hockey! But my first love, and my first experience of reading for myself, was with the sports pages spread out on the living room floor while my dad sat in his chair reading about the war and the riots. It felt important. Like something grown-ups do.

Sadly, for readers of the New York and Los Angeles Times, that option no longer exists.

Those newspapers (can we still call them papers?) have abandoned the field to digital media and discontinued carrying standings and box scores. They still have sports sections of a sort, but they resemble the human interest stories usually reserved for Sunday magazine features. Gone are the guts of the sports pages. 

What is a sports section without box scores? What is a sports section if you can't even find the standings? 

Without that essential element of sport, there are no more sports pages. And that means some little kid learning to read will be clutching a device, scrolling for scores, maybe messaging friends. Turning those pages on the living room floor at my dad’s feet was a rite of passage into adulthood. Now it's gone, like so much else.

What does that mean?

I wrote in the last post that the best teaching guidance I ever got came from a colleague who advised, with regard to students, "Your only job is to love them." It’s a true story, but I wanted to expand and clarify. Even as I was writing it I was thinking, “What the heck does that mean?” What did it mean to me?

In my career this advice formed a perfect framework for my practice, a perfect center from which to operate, but what did it look like? And since each of us has to do the work of understanding what it means to us and to our students and to each student, what can it look like? And how do you measure it?”

For me, loving my students meant that every decision I made was based on what I judged to be in the best interests of one or all of them. It’s easy to say “Of course! That’s obvious!” And it may be obvious in the abstract, but in the real world it’s not so simple. There are choices that are risky, choices that are difficult or burdensome or just damned inconvenient. 

From what book to teach (or, as test-prep pressure has ramped up, even to teach books at all) to seating arrangements to the amount of homework to give to whether to go out on strike, I tried to make all my decisions entirely from the perspective of what’s in it for them. That way I was able to figure out what to do, and able to rest easy in my decisions and defend them to those who criticized my choices. 

Just remember that you are the expert in the classroom. You know better than any administrator and almost every coach or consultant you will ever meet. Be confident in your choices. Treat the kids like the humans they are.

Your choices will surely be different from mine, of course, but just keep in mind that our students are fully incorporated human beings, developing and incomplete (who isn’t?), with needs and dreams and anger and sadness and humor and insight and everything else. They are not “problems” but puzzles. They are not numbers on a spreadsheet or avatars of your brilliance. They are not the enemy unless you make them the enemy.

What they need to know is what’s in it for them. And they need to know that we are asking and answering that question on their behalf every day. That’s what we’re there for.

It doesn’t mean you have to be a pushover in the classroom. Or even particularly nice. Every student I ever met–including the ones who didn’t like me very much–knew one thing: I was there for them. I cared about them. I cared for them. I asked a lot of them because I believed in them a lot. They know when you’re on their side and when you’re not.

Now, nobody who ever took any of my courses would say it was a sappy feel-good place to be. Or easy. We worked really hard. That’s how we proved we cared–about the work and about each other. They knew I believed in them because I asked them to know and do things they hadn’t before. They got bigger, and so did I by knowing them.

But knowing students is not what modern school big-brain thinkers think is important. If it can’t be quantified and by that I mean reduced to its least important, least relevant, least informative number, then it’s not important. We value what we can measure. Easily. At least the bosses do.

I’ve written before that the concerns of school bosses–principals, directors, superintendents, school board members, as well as state and federal officials–are not congruent with those of teachers or even students. In many cases, those sets of concerns are not even compatible. Instead of individual human beings, bosses tend to think of students as aggregations of data points which, when properly assembled, lead to a promotion and a better job in the district.

Take testing, for example. Test scores, at least those on the Big Standardized Tests (h/t Peter Greene), are bureaucratic, sometimes political concerns, and the bosses dedicate a lot of resources to the administration of those tests. Administrators also try to convince teachers–often through fakery and intimidation–that they should spend a ton of classroom time and other resources on the attempt to raise scores.

As others have written here and here, and as I’ve written here, and here, and most recently here, these tests are not useful. The data are invalid and unreliable and, at best, the tests measure the degree to which a student reproduces a set of favored knowledge within prescribed terms of expression, in a single-session time period. Fundamentally, Big Standardized Tests are a sorting mechanism that tracks poverty and propels a "failing schools" narrative.

In fact, they are destructive with negative impacts on students as the curriculum is narrowed to service the testing and time is diverted in an effort to pump up scores.

So when you are faced with giving a Big Standardized Test that is effectively meaningless and even detrimental to your students but high-stakes for your school, your job, and for the way your boss is likely to treat you, what do you do? How do you reconcile a vicious testing regime with the prime directive of loving your students? Here’s how I did it: I gave the test.

I gave the test because I wanted to keep my job. You probably have to give the test in order to keep your job. Ask yourself if your students are better off without you. If the answer is “no,” and it had better be, then there are things you have to do in order to be there for them.

However, you don’t have to spend two weeks of instructional time trying to pump scores so your life will be easier. You don’t have to pretend to your students that the test is the most important week of the school year. And you don’t have to “touch the poster” of standards three times a class in the hope that magically scores will go up. They say “Don’t forget to touch the poster”; I say my students expect more than performative childishness. I won’t talk down to them (the way some bosses talk down to teachers).

There are other ways to push back, to love the kids more than you love smooth sailing, a slightly easier day at the office. 

Is your boss trying to enforce some PD consultant’s brainchild of stopping what everybody is doing every fifteen minutes and pushing them around the room in a mingle? Research-based! Ignore the boss the moment your students look up and say “Aww, it was just getting good!” You might get a mean face from your supervisor or called into a meeting, but you will have done the right thing for the right reason and you can feel good about defending your decision.

Do you have a tree on campus fit to read poetry under? Take them there one afternoon. Disregard questions about “rigor” or standards. Answer if your bosses ask, but don’t take them seriously.

You want to take the class on a walking tour of campus to help out new students? I did that and got berated by an assistant principal. I “won” my grievance and got an apology (of sorts). Honest! And I kept doing the tours.

We had a problem with tardies first period, so I started asking every tardy student to come to the front and sing with me. ABCs or Wheels on the Bus–you know, school-related. We went from twelve or so students coming anywhere from two to thirty minutes late to one or two students coming five minutes late. One of them complained to my principal and I got written up for that one and had to stop and tardies went up again. Sometimes you lose.

In the end, what does it really mean to “love your students”? For me, it was to keep trying to get better. Keep trying to learn more about your content. Keep trying to learn more about each student because the truth, for me at least, was that the answer to what it means is different with every student, for every teacher, and it can change every day, every year.

Keep trying to generate better lesson plans. Keep looking for better materials. Observe other classrooms. Talk to colleagues about what works for them. Come to school every day unless you just can’t take it, then take a day off. That’s for the kids, too. 

Simply put: Listen. Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Say you’re sorry. Prepare. See the big picture. Give second chances. Give them the time they need. Give them your time.

This all sounds peachy, but how do you measure it?

First of all, not everything great and almost nothing sublime can be measured at all. Keep that in your heart.

Second, you sure as hell don’t measure your expertise, your effectiveness as a teacher, or your commitment to your students by adding up scores on a generic Big Standardized Test. If you want to know how you’re doing, get to know your students. 

I used to start every year by getting to know the kids, at least a little. We spent a couple of weeks just talking and writing and playing a few games. I got my share of side eye from colleagues (“Aren’t you getting behind?”) and bosses (“When are you planning on starting?”) but it was worth it to watch the kids re-connecting with friends they hadn’t seen, give them space to ask me questions and get to know me, and to start to figure out who these people were. 

I started from the position that I couldn’t know if my students were getting something if I didn’t know what it looked like when they did and when they didn’t. That was me. But of course that’s not the work my bosses wanted me to do. They paid lip service to the importance of a “safe, respectful, responsible” environment that valued each student, but their focus was always on test scores and how everything I was doing–we were doing–impacted those scores. My friend Nick used to remind me that you tell an organization's priorities by the way it allocates resources. Actions, not words. Follow the money.

That’s why you get programs–treatments, not treats. In his Curmudgucation post "A Treat, not a Treatment," Peter Greene writes:

Harold Pixley, one of my high school band directors, used to have a saying that summed up his programming philosophy; 

Give the audience a treat, not a treatment.

His thinking was that the music should not be some kind of unpleasant medicine--good for you, but unenjoyable, a painful cure for what ails you.

Some education discussions remind me of Pix's words. There's this continuing thread, this notion that the Youngs all suffer from a variety of maladies, all distinguished by what the children lack--knowledge, understanding, skills, etc--and it is the job of schools to give children a treatment to fix them.

I saw this over and over while I was in the classroom. Sometimes it was the students they were trying to fix. A lot of times it was the teachers. Regardless, the “treatment” usually came in the form of a new technique or program, usually with a new acronym, and it invariably involved ridiculous PDs and served as a make-work project for school-based coaches and imported consultants. 

Not that we ever had the chance to implement them before the next new new thing came along, but what would have indicated success? That students were “fixed”? What do you think? They didn’t spend billions of dollars creating billions of tests for nothing.

The problem? As Greene observes:

Education treatment fans dismiss the premise that a teacher needs to know or know about the students. The right treatment will always work. And because they focus on the deficiency, education treatment fans often display an absurd lack of understanding about human children or the education thereof.

<snip>

The related premise of the treatment school of education is that children are pre-humans, being prepper for their Real Life, which hasn't actually started yet. Therefore, the daily concerns of things like joy and accomplishment and building relationships and figuring out how to be your best human self in the world--none of those things should matter. 

But they do matter. They matter or nothing you do makes any difference anyway. Not to them, and not to you. 

So how do you withstand the deluge of bad ideas and weather the storm of pressure to act in the interests of the district, or the school, your department, or your self? The answer to that question is the best teaching guidance I ever got.

When you’re not sure how to proceed, or you are getting criticism or pressure from your bosses, resist all the bad ideas you can, trust your instincts, and use your own best professional judgment to act in the best interests of your students. 

Your only job is to love them.

Your only job is to love them.

This post was inspired by Peter Greene’s recent Curmudgucation post, “A Treat, not a Treatment,” which reminded me of something that I learned about teaching and that sustained me for over twenty years.

This is from a pep talk I once gave for new teachers.

Your only job is to love them.

So you’re a teacher. It’s a lot, I know. It can be really intense. But it can also be sublime. 

When things don’t make any sense or come at you too fast, or when you get frustrated and angry, or when you feel overwhelmed, remember that it’s because you care. You care about your students and the work you do with them, and you want things to be better. 

In other words, you are not crazy. 

You’re just human. You’re a teacher. You might be working in a public school or private, a charter, could be elementary, middle, or high school. College maybe. Wherever you are--even retired!--I hope you have found what I’ve said here today encouraging and helpful. Or, we could have just skipped to the end because this is the secret. This is everything: Your only job is to love them. 

I was in my second or third year at Los Angeles High School. By the way, the third year sucks. I know people tell you that the first year is the hardest and that if you can get through that first year, you can do anything. Bullshit. My first year was easy because I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know how hard it was.

My first year was chaos. I might have been okay, I might have been terrible. I was so numb I couldn’t feel a thing. Bit by bit I figured things out and, in those days, new teachers had space to screw up and fix it. Now, not so much. 

So one of the first things I figured out was that I wanted students to have power over their own lives. By the time I got to my third year that idea had become my reason for being in the classroom, and it was then that I realized that I had no clue how to make it happen. Knowing what you want for students and not knowing how to help them get there was torture. That third year was murder.

Anyway, I was in the middle of the wilderness that was my third year and I was always on the verge of tears--even in the morning over coffee because I already knew what kind of day it was going to be and that I’d have no answer for it. 

Then, in the middle of one of those days, I see my friend Reed coming up the stairs while I am going down.

“What’s the matter, Jeff?” Reed had two more years of experience than I did and he offered me lesson plans and materials and a shoulder to cry on. He was a sensitive, thoughtful friend and colleague, one of many I don’t know anymore. That’s another thing that’s hard. Anyway, he asks me what’s wrong and I stop halfway down the stairs and he stops halfway up and I’m almost crying. 

“They don’t like what I’m asking them to do. I don’t even like what I’m asking them to do. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. What do I do?” Or something to that effect.

We probably only had two minutes to get to class, but Reed reached out across the hand rail and put his hand on my shoulder. He said, “Jeff, your only job… is to love them. That’s it. I gotta go.” And he hopped up the stairs and out of sight.

I know it sounds sappy. I think I even said “right” under my breath and rolled my eyes as I turned around. The thing is, I never stopped thinking about it. And the more I considered it, the more it made sense. In fact, it turned out to be the only thing that made any real sense at all. 

As teachers, we are hoping and trying to guide students in a direction we have chosen for them. Because we believe it will be “good for them.” Because we believe that their lives will be enriched as ours have been, and that they can and ought to have the power to make that happen. 

Along the way we are making a thousand consequential decisions every day. You will make more consequential decisions in one work day than most people will in a month: Call on this kid or that one. Press harder or ease up. Follow the plan, change the lesson, start over. Go faster. Slow down. Tone of voice. Eyebrow up or down. Give a second chance. 

You have dozens of dynamic human beings interacting based on their experiences and their perceptions of their experiences--most of which you don’t and will never know about--and it is terrifying. It’s like stand-up comedy meets the quantum physics class you’ve been placed in by mistake. But it’s also jazz and you really are trying to play together. 

In the middle of all that, teachers are trying to make the best one or ten or hundred decisions in every minute. Based on our training. Based on our experience. Based on our best intentions. You are human, and you are going to screw up sometimes. If you don’t, you’re not really trying to do anything significant. It helps if you remember why you’re there. 

Your only job is to love them. Each of us has to do the work of understanding what it means to us and to our students and to each student. But however you come to understand it, however you interpret it in your own practice, if you act from this place you will always be doing the right thing--no matter what anyone says. 

That’s it. That is the whole ballgame. Try and keep in mind that the kids are not the enemy unless you make them the enemy. Give yourself permission to love them and opportunities to do it, make sure everything comes from that place, and everything else can be learned. Without that, nothing you do makes any difference anyway. Not to them, and not to you. Have a great career. I can only hope you have as much fun as I did. Bon voyage.