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.