the myth of the hero teacher

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Yesterday a colleague shared an INCREDIBLE post on Facebook entitled "The Myth of the Hero Teacher" by Allison Ricket.  You need to pause and read this right now!

If you have been reading along with me this year, you know in April I also wrote about the idea of teachers as heroes in this post.  I am thrilled that Ricket's article so clearly explains the fallacy of thinking about teachers as heroes. 

Her final two paragraphs are a call to action that brilliantly points to a path for genuine improvement in American education.  I hope you will take her words to heart.

We need to draw more attention not to how individual teachers overcome immeasurable odds, but to ways in which we can reduce those odds to begin with. If teachers need to be creative and honest in the classroom—if that’s what makes a teacher a “hero”—then we need to dismantle the obstacles to creativity and free speech on a wide scale so that those teachers become the rule, not the exception. We need to promote teacher creativity by reducing the amount of standardized testing and the resulting fear of poor results and loss of funding. If being authentic were really a quality valued in great teachers, we would celebrate inclusive, empowering teachers regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or ability. 

 

The dramatic light the hero myth casts on teachers is one I think we—as teachers—should wholeheartedly work to avoid. The example of a few isolated individuals working alone in red capes makes for an inspiring narrative, but it won’t transform our troubled educational system. We need a new narrative for teaching, one that we write together, one that unites us as educators and honors our students.

 

You can read more from Allison Ricket here.

hero worship

Consider a question like, “How many pairs of shoes do you own?”  I am guessing most people in the U.S. would answer somewhere in the neighborhood of two to thirty pairs of shoes.  According to the Daily Mail, the average woman in the U.K. owns nineteen pairs of shoes but wears only seven.  But that’s not important.  What I want to talk about is the woman that owns two hundred pairs of shoes.  She is unusual by almost any standard and statisticians would call her an outlier.  Outliers are pieces of data that alter the outcome in significant ways, so much so that sometimes statisticians throw them out on the grounds that they are not reflective of the general population.  Outliers are impactful.  We can decide how much impact we want them to have.

So there.  You learned a little statistics.

Now consider this movie plot.  An experiment in a lab causes a spider to become infected with a radioactive virus.  The spider then bites a man.  The man dies.  The spider dies.  End of story.  Not much of a story is it?  No one tells this story because it is both predictable and unexceptional.  No one cares about the story where Peter Parker dies.  But we love the story where Peter Parker becomes a super hero.  Spiderman is unusual.  He is an outlier.

Our deep worship of and fascination with the outlier is culturally entrenched.  Everyone loves the story of a person that overcomes incredible odds to excel.  We also watch the fall of our heroes played out in the media with glee. 

So how does this relate to education?

It seems love of the outlier colors our every desire, our every

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decision.  We want our schools to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” no matter the budget or the challenges of poverty, violence, and health that the children face.  We demand that teachers meet every child’s needs, differentiate every lesson, overcome every setback, because that’s what Jaime Escalante and a few other teachers somehow managed to do.  We envision our schools and our teachers as somehow able to work miracles and fix what has taken decades to break.  And we don’t even apologize for our expectations.

Part of what's hamstringing education today is the demand for outliers.  Heroes do things faster and better, and so do our best schools, teachers, and students.  But this cannot be the expectation.  We can certainly use excellence as a model, to use awesome as inspiration, but in the end, to expect it from everyone is not reasonable.  There's a reason why everyone cannot be an outlier.  Outliers are rare.  Heroes are rare.  Demanding more does not make a hero. 
 
On the flip side, I think it’s perfectly o.k. to want these things, to hope for a hero. But hope is not a plan.  I am a math teacher.  My job is to teach kids math, assuming they want to learn, and they had breakfast, and they didn’t have a fight with their boyfriend, and they can concentrate for more than a minute, and.. and… and…  If I’m lucky, in the process of teaching math, I might just stumble into some lessons of hard work, compassion, leadership, overcoming adversity, and helping others. 

That’s it folks.  That’s a good day. I’m not a hero.  I’m a teacher.  If you want me or my school or these kids to be heroes, to be outliers, you’re going to have to help.  And by help I don’t mean inventing more hoops for us to jump through, more tests to take.  I mean putting your time, your money, and your wisdom where your mouth is. I mean actually doing something to help schools, teachers, and students.

Does your school have the supplies and computers it needs to be successful?  Do your school’s teachers have the time and training to do the job well?  Do your school’s students have the tutors and one-on-one attention they need to be successful?  No?  So what are YOU going to do about it? 

What if I expected YOU to be an outlier? Hey hero, how does that feel?

 

how parents can help their children succeed in school

So it's happened.  Your wonderful, happy child earned a less-than-stellar grade in school. Whether this happens in 1st grade or late in high school, only once or many times, it can be a really stressful time.  Parents want their children to succeed and love school.  Students want school to be fun, social, and interesting.  Teachers need to prepare students for high stakes tests or to advance to the next level.  Can you see how the three parties involved in education sometimes have different and even competing interests? 

I think it's wonderful when parents want to get involved in the educational process and help their children succeed.  There's a clear set of steps to follow and by doing so, the three sides of the educational triangle have the best chance of success. 

Step 1:  Talk to your child.  You don't need to yell.  Just ask questions. 

1. Why do you think you didn't do well?
2. What did you do to prepare?
3. Did you complete all the required and review assignments and readings? 
4. Did you take and study your notes?
5. Did you ask the teacher for help during class and/or after school?
6. What did the teacher suggest you do?  Did you complete the suggestions?

The answers might be great, but may also include comments like, "Everyone did poorly," "The teacher hates me," "There was too much work," or "It took too long." 

As the parent, you have to ignore at least some of this.  It is unlikely that everyone did poorly.  More likely your child and perhaps a couple of friends did poorly, but if everyone did poorly, there would be remediation. 

"The teacher hates me" is most often projection.  Students both want to be liked and hate getting bad grades and often the negativity of poor performance gets mixed up in personal feelings.  As a 27 year teaching veteran, I can honestly say that it's hard to hate a child.  It's easy to hate their behaviors and so it's best for everyone to try to remove all the emotional baggage from the conversation and focus on these behaviors. 

The last two student comments are critical places for the parent to step in.  Most students want to spend the least amount of time possible on homework.  It's in their nature.  Work is not always fun and so it makes sense to do the minimum, especially if things have been going well for a while.  What students need to understand is that when a class becomes difficult, they need to spend more time on it.  Their inclination is to actually spend less because they don't like it or it's hard, and this creates a feedback loop that doesn't take long to spiral into failure.  Time is often a challenge for our over-scheduled students, but parents who help their children set aside additional time for homework and reprioritize activities have the best chance of helping their children turn things around. 

Parents often also want to help their children with the work and this is great if you can do it without yelling, but there are some important guidelines. 

• Don't do the work for them.  (Only your child should be holding the pencil or typing the words.)
• Stay within your levels of expertise.  (If you don't speak Spanish, don't try to help.)
• Accept that at some point you can no longer help because your child has surpassed your knowledge. (This is a good thing) .
• Limit your efforts to 30 minute sessions. (You'll both feel better if you do something different after 30 minutes.  You can come back later if needed.)

It is possible that even after you take all these steps, the progress you seek doesn't happen.  Even if your student is spending more time on the work, completing all assignments, and following teacher suggestions, the grades might not improve as quickly or as far as you'd like.  Time for Step 2.

Step 2:  Contact the teacher and express your concerns and expectations.  You don't need to yell.  Just ask questions.

1. Is my child doing his/her part?
2. Is there something he/she should do differently or in addition?
3. Is there something we can do at home to help?
4. Can the teacher or a tutor help after school?
5. What are the actionable steps and checks we can complete to measure progress?

Write everything down.  Make sure you understand.  Ideally your child is in the conference, but if not, you need to be able to explain the plan.

Implement the plan.  Follow through with your child.  Accept no excuses.  Check work, monitor study time, review flashcards together, do whatever you decided was the plan.  Check in with the teacher about classroom progress and behavior. 

It is possible that even after you take all these steps, the progress you seek still doesn't happen.  This is frustrating, but not the end of the world.  Sometimes your expectations for progress are not realistic for your child or the discipline.  Sometimes intellectual processing and maturation takes longer than a week or two.  Don't panic.  Run through Step 1 again.  Ask those questions.  Run through Step 2 again.  Contact the teacher.  Make sure you and your child have done everything you said you would.  Develop another plan.  Keep working on it.  (If you think all this is too much effort, then maybe you should reconsider your expectations.)

When you reach the point where you feel you and your child have done everything possible, then and only then should you implement Step 3. 

Step 3:  Contact someone else in the school. 

I think it's easy to start at the top, to speak to a principal or department chair and express your grievances.  But the reality is, the administrator will have to turn around and discuss the situation with the teacher, so in a lot of cases you are simply putting someone in the middle of a situation that will resolve itself in exactly the same way. 

I would never suggest that there aren't poor teachers and problems that can only be resolved by administrators. But more often than not, these are the exceptions.  Most issues can be handled through communication between parents, students, and teachers.  It's also important to remember that we all face challenges and problems that are difficult.  Teaching your children how to work through these problems is an important part of growing up and the responsibility of both schools and parents. 

There are a lot of hard realities that we parents have to face in dealing with our children's setbacks.  We must accept that our children are not the smartest in the class or equally able in every subject.  Not every child will get an A in a particular class and most children do not get A's in every subject.  Many schools have various tracks so that the pace of the learning meets the developmental progress of the children.  This means that not every child will nor should be in the advanced track.  Just because a parent is an engineer or a poet doesn't say anything about a child's abilities or interests.  

Whether a student's challenges come in geometry, history, chemistry, English, or French is actually pretty unimportant.  We all have strengths and weaknesses.  Learning to leverage the strengths and improve the weak areas is the key to success.  That's what schools and parents must teach. 

In the end, we are all on the same team, the one in which students create their own successes and understanding in school.  The parent and the teacher are there to guide and assist, but it is the student that must do the work and learn from the consequences of actions.  In school and in life, everyone falls down.  What we do next says everything about us.  

YOU are a leader!

I thought I would share this TEDTalk that is one of my favorites.  Perhaps I should regularly feature talks on TEDTuesday.  There are so many wonderful choices! 

What I love about Drew Dudley's talk is that everything and anything we do can make a difference.  We never know when something small, something we've forgotten, will make a difference in someone's life. 

Today, some motivation to live, speak, and act with a little more kindness.  Enjoy! 

what if you're doing it wrong?

I've always hated "list" posts.  They tell you the 5 best of this or the 8 worst of that.  They often claim to solve problems from how to lose weight to how to save a marriage to how to ask for a raise.  I usually find they over-simplify or generalize to the point of being useless.


With that rather negative introduction, I ask you to consider the following post, Six of the best: the traits your child needs to succeed.

In it the author proceeds to list and describe the six qualities that children need to be successful in school. 

1. Joie de vivre

2. Resilience

3. Self-discipline

4. Honesty

5. Courage

6. Kindness

Hillary Wilce concludes the post with the following: 

"Our children badly need us to help them develop stronger, more flexible backbones, and all the qualities that contribute to a strong inner core can be actively fostered and encouraged by parents (parents and schools working together is even better). Just as muscles grow stronger with regular exercise, so character traits are strengthened by thoughtful encouragement and reinforcement."

I'm trying to set aside the fact that there is no discussion of the relationship that these traits have with success in school.  Do these traits cause kids to be successful?  Does success in school provide the exercise to strengthen these traits?  Or do these traits and success in school happen together, both enhanced by any number of additional, unexplored factors ranging from genetics to family income to who knows what?

What I really want to know is what you think about the very idea of fostering traits in children.  Do you think it is even possible to "build" a child with these traits?  What role do parents and schools play in creating these "super" children?

I ask because as a parent of two sons who could not be more different, I have to wonder what I did that made them so.  As a teacher of literally thousands of students whose accomplishments range from incredible success to dismal failure, I have to ask what I and their parents did to foster the disparate range of traits that resulted. 

It's not that I don't think there's a level of responsibility inherent in teaching or in parenting.  There is tremendous responsibility in both jobs and the article is happy to list those things parents believe are the schools' and teachers' jobs, items like "well-run lessons, skilled teachers, a creative curriculum, high expectations."  But as I watch parents beat themselves up because they're too tired to make every meal perfectly nutritious and teachers give up in despair because their students can't pass the state exams, I think we need to ask ourselves if articles like this aren't really just a set up. 

Do parents (and teachers) really have the ability to create kids that possess joie de vivre, resilience, self-discipline, honesty, courage, and kindness?  Are there really parents (or teachers) out there actively discouraging these traits? 
 
If we are to believe articles like this and take a look at the children of the world, we are forced to come to the conclusion that most kids do not have all these traits.  And if your own children, wonderful as they are, are among those that do not exhibit these traits, then this means that someone, everyone, or perhaps just you, are doing "it" wrong. 

snow days

So it got cold in Orlando, a brisk 35 degrees on Tuesday morning.  Then we all blinked, and it was mostly over.  It'll be 80 degrees by Friday.  But my friends up north were not so lucky.  As the temperatures dropped below zero with dangerously cold wind chills, schools all over the north and even those as far south as Atlanta closed their doors.  This wasn't a just a snow day, although there was plenty of snow.  Millions of parents sighed in dismay as snow days turned their homes into prisons.

You'd think snow days would be awesome, but most of these kids have been home for two or more weeks. With the excitement of Christmas and New Year's over, these snow days stunk.  Kids were bored.  It's tough to entertain 7-year old Sally for days on end when she's trapped inside.  She needs exercise and interaction with other kids, something that's not possible when you're snowed in and it's literally too cold to play outside. Tough too, occupying her brother, 9-year-old Billy, a child not so excited about reading or doing puzzles.  He'd much rather fight with his sister, watch cartoons, or play video games for hours on end, much to his mother's dismay.

The cold will end and all the children will head back to school.  A collective and silent parental cheer of relief will erupt nationwide.  But school is not always such a great place for kids.  Teachers across the country will embrace these restless little souls, not just one or two at a time, but in packs of thirty, all confined to a twenty by twenty foot room. You'd think there'd be science experiments and games, theatre performances complete with costumes and learning as play.  Study after study has shown us this is how to best teach kids, but we no longer have time to do these things   Instead we continually cut back on rich experiences in favor of more and more seat work.  The richness is confined to "specials" like physical education, computers, art, or music a couple times a week.  We all know that kids only have pent up energy on Mondays and Thursdays right before lunch.  Their musical and artistic creativity can be adequately expressed from 9:30-10:00 on alternate Wednesdays.  And frankly, what's the point of teaching them about computers.  In twenty years we'll all have a chip in our heads anyway. 

This is the modern school.  Children are forced to sit too quietly for hours on end, preparing for standardized tests and five-paragraph essays.  There will be plenty of math worksheets but little physical release.  There's always another spelling test but no money or time for music, for art, for beauty.  And teachers will do the job of somehow entertaining and educating these children, a job that many parents are tired of doing after a week or two. 

Teachers do their best, but let's all be honest.  The only thing that matters is the standardized test.  The test is the measure the student, the teacher, and the school.  Unfortunately that means that for a lot of kids, once they get to school, every day is a really bad, totally boring snow day. 

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global intelligence

Yesterday the results of an international standardized test were released and surprising to no one, the U.S. did not fair well in the comparison.  You can read a brief summary of the findings here. 


There are a lot of questions inherent in such tests.

• How were the students selected?
• Who wrote the questions?
• Did the students prepare for the test?
• Is the sample of students from each country similar?
• How can we compare ourselves to countries where not all students attend school?
• Was the test controlled for cultural bias?
• Does the test actually assess something we care about?

My list can go on and on.  I attempted to research some of these questions, but the website is not as helpful as I would like.  I don't have answers, just more questions.

I think the last question is especially important, so before we once again start beating up on our 15-year-olds, our teachers, and our educational system, why don't we take a look at the problems.  Try them yourself.  There's only 6.  I answered them in about 10 minutes, but I am a math teacher.  Can you do them all?  Presumably everyone older than fifteen should get them correct.  But whether you can or you cannot, I think we'd better start asking the right questions.

• What is it that we actually want our children to learn? 
• What kind of problems should they be able to solve? 
• What are our goals?
• How will we know if we've met them? 
• What are the best means to reach these goals?
• What do we need to be successful?
• Are we willing to do whatever it takes to educate every child in America? 

I welcome your thoughts. 

You can find some additional commentary here

truth... with a side of bacon

Teachers are actually people. 

I know that seems like a ridiculous statement, but I think people forget sometimes that we are just like everyone else most days.  We don't have superhuman abilities to manage teeneagers.  We don't have endless patience.  And we definitely have lives, friends, and family.  Our weekdays revolve around our school and our students, but I just want to mention one thing to all those readers out there, be you parents, students, colleagues, or friends.  

NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU.

I see my students everywhere in the Orlando area, in restaurants, at concerts, in the grocery store.  I remember one student looking in my cart, and asking in a stunned voice, "You eat bacon?" 

Yes...  yes I do.  I've also been having a decade long on-again, off-again love affair with Swedish Fish.  I do a lot of things that students and parents don't know about.  I have interests and friends unrelated to my career.  I have my own children and some days they drive me nuts.  They drive their teachers nuts sometimes too.  And I know this will shock you, but I'm not a superhero.

So I'm asking you, dear reader, to cut teachers a break.  We have bad days.  We lose our temper.  We are sad and happy, excited and exhausted.  And all this means that not every day is a perfect day for us or for our students.  We are truly sorry for those days.  But we keep coming back because we believe that maybe for one kid, maybe for your kid, we can make a difference. Even on a Monday morning, we come back to try again, because we love our disciplines, our students, and our schools.

And bacon...  I for one definitely love bacon.

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your comments are appreciated

This past week was the end of the quarter and at midsemester we take the time to not only give students grades but also write comments on their progress this far.  Student grades are posted every two weeks, so there are really no surprises, but this practice continues on.  It is definitely a time-consuming process.  I often wonder if the parents read what we write.

Here is a sample:

John is off to an uneven start in Geometry. He completes assignments consistently and seems to have a reasonable understanding of the ideas we discuss, but he is not always able to translate that into performance on tests and quizzes. I have asked John to see me to discuss his mistakes, but I have not seen him lately in study period. It is likely that a little time reviewing with me before the next test would go a long way toward ensuring that he has the details mastered. John is quiet in class and only speaks when called upon. I would love for him to take a little initiative and start putting his work on the board and volunteering to answer questions. The more he engages in the class on a daily basis, the more he learns. John has plenty of potential, and I look forward to his efforts in the coming weeks.

double stuff

I grade AP Calculus exams in the summer for a week.  It's a festival of math nerds, and if it weren't for the grading, would be my favorite vacation.  As such, it's plenty of work, but still a lot of fun.

 

One of the things I am able to do is take note of national trends in how students think about calculus.  We grade thousands of papers and the data is overwhelmingly obvious in some cases.  The past two years, a particular concept has been tripping the kids up.  It's called the chain rule, and the calculus aficionados in the world will recognize that it is a simple rule by which we are able to take the derivative of composite functions.  I teach this idea in early September and use oreos to illustrate the concept. I think the kids grasp it pretty well. 

Yesterday we were doing SAT prep, an activity the students dread, and we also had oreos.  Now don't panic.  There is absolutely no calculus on the SAT.  But the oreo eating was an opportunity to reinforce an idea in a new context, an opportunity to talk about the chain rule for just a minute while in the middle of something else, thereby making a new link to the idea.  I'm talking about building memory and helping kids encode ideas successfully.  It turns out, the more links we have to ideas, the more likely it is we are going to remember them.  

Memory formation is a reasonably well-understood process in the brain, and although we don't know every detail of the brain's functioning, any teacher worth her salt has a pretty good grasp on how to help kids learn and remember in her particular discipline.   

Yesterday's oreos were not an accident.  Repeated exposure over time improves memory retrieval.  If I have the time, I can create a well-planned class where each activity is useful and most every minute is utilized.  That's what teachers do all day, every day, and why we get so upset when some random person off the street thinks they can come in and do it better. 

Random Guy thinks this was a waste of time. 
Concerned Mom wishes I didn't give her baby sugar.  
Joe Student unknowingly had his brain manipulated.  
Visiting Principal didn't see any calculus. 
You know different.



If you want to know more about memory, you'll find a decent discussion here.

welcome to the wild, wild west

 

I see the same ten students every morning for three years through our advisory program.  The job is to be a mentor, a teacher, a surrogate parent while they are on campus.  We talk about everything... school, sports, college, dating, the internet, goals, home life.  On Thursdays I see them for 30 minutes.  We eat breakfast and have a good talk.  This week this short video from Common Sense Media on digital literacy started our conversation.  Click "Brittney's Story to watch."

Brittney's Story

I asked my students if their parents were their friends on Facebook.  About half said yes, but even more said their parents don't really know how to use Facebook.  I asked them if they think they should say something when a friend posts something stupid.  That led to the quote of the day.

"If I had to spend my day pointing out every time a friend did or said something stupid, I'd be exhausted."

The internet is the wild, wild west. What do your kids post on the internet? 

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