Learning is a wonderful thing, it's a shame we have to go to school to get it. In the hopes of improving schools, a bad student tries to figure out why he became a teacher.
The Audience Matters. Let’send this business of a one way street for homework assignments. It’s bigger than us and our grade-books. Let them show their work to the class, other classes, and other teachers. Let them tell the school at lunch about something they are passionate about. Let them get contact experts in the field, invite a local University professor or two to sit in on presentations and provide feedback. The desire to do well in school directly correlates with the amount of people who will see them doing well.
There are 4 basic ways to set up desks in a classroom, and the rest are variations. The problem, of course, is the traditional school only allows so many options.
Nevertheless, every set up is a statement about the teacher’s beliefs, values, and fears. Would you be a dictator, divide and conquerer, diva, or democrat?
The basics of engaging students. People talk about all these fancy strategies for student engagement and inclusion, but it’s pretty simple - just talk less. If you do, amazing things will happen. You’ll realize you like your students more than you thought you did. Your students will like you more than they thought they did. They will like coming to class. They will stop you in the hallway to say hi. They will do their homework more often, and with more quality. They will tell other teachers that they like you. You will like your job more. And you’ll find that the inverse of this graph is also true: the more they talk the less bored you will be.
Give them some control over what to study. Put them in front of the room. Ask them for help with rubrics. Have them write your tests. Bring in an expert. Have them interview each other. Have a seminar — but whatever you do, for pete’s sake, talk less.
Number of times King George III dropped the f-bomb. Happy 4th of July!
Life v School
Bitch please. Try education in Asia. American education does not even touch what rote memorization is.
lol…
What good classroom management looks like. If there’s one thing you should know about managing a classroom, it’s that you’ve got to have at least three things at the ready: your respect for your students (that you actively show them), their respect of you (which partly comes from respecting them), and a willingness to drop the almighty hammer on them (KABOOM).
But what they don’t tell you before you start teaching is that if you can get the first two in line (mutual respect) then the kids will actually want you to drop the hammer, and will look to you for it. They will be waiting patiently for you to step in when a classmate of theirs is out of line because at the end of the day kids want to learn. In fact, if there’s a student in the room who is preventing every one else from learning and you don’t do any hammer dropping, they will quietly resent you at best, or hate you at worst.
Knowing when to drop the hammer and when not to takes practice, but it’s got to be in your tool-belt. Don’t be afraid. Make it rain.
Unlearning the “right answer”. Life v School part 4.
The truth is, every profession should be granted the opportunity for a time of reflection, renewal, and rest. Teachers, stop being ashamed of having your summer “off”, and tell the haters to back up.
Wordle of year-end Advisory comments (total 2500 words, 9 students). At the end of each semester, advisors (like homeroom teachers, except different) are asked to take a look at each of their students’ academic and social profile and write a “comment” for their report card. While it’s time consuming and requires a lot of heavy lifting at the end of the school year, it is worth it. This is a word cloud of my advisory comments for nine 11th graders.
At first glance, it’s fascinating to see how the dominant words are rooted in the structure of the school day/school calendar. YEAR (calendar) and CLASS (schedule) dwarf words like curiosity, energy, potential, and development. Don’t underestimate how the form of schools influences how we function in it. In some ways it determines it.
I’m just sayin…
![Ken Robinson: “There are really two types of people [in schools]. Academic and non academic. Smart people and non smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they are not, because they’ve been judged against this particular view of the mind. So we have twin pillars, economic and intellectual. And my view is that this model has caused chaos in many people’s lives.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2h6wkYJQE1rtp77go1_500.png)
Ken Robinson: “There are really two types of people [in schools]. Academic and non academic. Smart people and non smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they are not, because they’ve been judged against this particular view of the mind. So we have twin pillars, economic and intellectual. And my view is that this model has caused chaos in many people’s lives.”
A major flaw in how we educate our students. As a teacher, I’m as guilty as anyone else of this.
