Order in the Classroom

I have started with my students this week. Tomorrow is day four with them and some classes are a little on the wild child side. Or would be if I let them. I created the following PowerPoint this afternoon to show them tomorrow. I am thinking if I make my procedures very explicit, they might follow them more readily. At the same time, I do not want to come off like some kind of strutting martinet. I hope these don't cross that line.

Classroom Procedures

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Talking

as the other students in the class
chat in quiet amiability while
working on their writing project
these young ladies just sat and talked
their volume rising slowly
almost imperceptibly
but steadily nonetheless

if they are going to refuse to work
why can't they at least do it quietly
like the ones who sleep so soundly
through the class every single day

but no
they insist on sitting there
publicly emoting to each other
the dramas of their lives
and their day at school

(and
to be honest
some of them do indeed
live through a great deal of real drama
too much to contend with
at their young age)

i wrestle with myself
as i observe them
heat slowly rising
in my face
in lockstep with
their increasing volume

i could do something
proactive
to make them quiet down
i could get up
and just sit near them
make them nervous
tenth graders detest
a teacher's propinquity

but my stomach is roiling
and jumping inside me
feels like i've been
repeatedly gut-punched
should have stayed home
but felt obligated
to come and teach them

most students are working
or at least appearing to
knowing that negative attention
lowers their grades
just these four loud talkers
inconsiderately interfering
with everyone's thought processes

so i reach to my left
and grab for the stack
of preprinted forms
ones i have prepared for
just such an occasion
and fill out detentions
for my chatty friends

see you all soon

©2009-Art Belliveau

10,000 Hours

In his newest book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell takes a long, hard, in-depth look at success. In the book he takes apart many of the American myths about success and looks at what it really takes.

One of the claims he makes in his book is that it takes a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice in order to become expert in doing something. If you want to be an expert in swimming, you need to spend 10,000 hours swimming. If you wish to be an expert teacher, you need to spend 10,000 hours teaching. If you want to be an expert writer, you need to spend 10,000 hours writing.

He even helpfully breaks this down a little more. 10,000 hours works out to be three hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for ten years. I was talking about this with a friend and we figured that meant about five years to become an expert teacher. Then I rethought. Even if we double the number of teaching hours from three to six, most teaching contracts run a maximum of 180-185 days. So that again, in my revised thinking, works out to about ten years.

Then I look back at my teaching career. I still apologize to students I taught my first year when I run across them. I assure them that I have improved since then. By my fifth year, I was just becoming relatively confident. I had the basics down and was working on improving. It took me a little over a decade to really feel like I had mastered the job. And even that feeling fades on occasion.

When I add to that the thought that, according to statistics compilrd by the NEA, 50% of all new teachers quit within their first five years, I have a real problem. Why are so many of these new professionals leaving before they have the chance to acquire expertise? So I have known have run away hard after just one year.

I think the answer might be in the way teachers are prepared for the classroom. Most teachers have minimum exposure to students prior to getting their first job. They have probably interned, but that is such a short time. Also, there is always that safety net of the supervising teacher. Sometimes, more than a safety net.

For instance, my supervising teacher never left her classroom. She sat in the back of the room quietly doing paperwork. However, when the class would get too loud to suit her, she would raise her head up from that paperwork and look meaningfully around the room. Sure enough they would get quiet. And I would (the next fall) go into my teaching career with no real experience in managing classroom behavior. I survived, but it was a rough year.

Tossing new teachers into the deep end with nothing to cling to but an anchor might not be the most effective way to retain teachers and help them get to their 10,000 hours. Doctors do it with paid, years long internships. Lawyers do it with years of case file work. I think it would be exceedingly rare for a first year doctor to provide surgery unassisted, or a first year lawyer to argue a case in open court with no supervision. Yet teachers are required to this all the time.

Maybe some sort of paid, years long internship for teachers is needed. But the cost, some will cry out. It is too expensive. How expensive is it now to have rotating teachers? How expensive is it to future generations that the teachers they had were so very far from being an expert in their field? There will be up from costs, no doubt––but the pay off on the back end might well be incalculable.

More than One Way to Skin a Cat

Yesterday I had fun. It was Evil Fun. But, in doing so, I believe I made a point and turned a potential struggle for control in the classroom into a comedy show.

This is my first full, five-day week with my writing students (all of them, that is, except the ones out driving with the drivers' ed teacher). As such I am taking time each day to explain and practice with them writing to each of the different types of journal prompts I use in class.

To digress, at the beginning of class I have a PowerPoint presentation that automatically loops around and around to the five different prompts. The first slide is a quote, the second a picture of some sort, the third a story starter from The Writer's Book of Matches: 1,001 Prompts to Ignite Your Fiction by the staff of fresh boiles peanuts, a lterary journal, the fourth a question from the Book of Questions, and lastly a chance to write on whatever topic interests them that day.

So each day this week I am introducing them to a different kind of prompt, getting them to write to it. Writing to it myself. Yesterday we were writing to the picture prompt. It is an old one of some football player being tackled. I don't even remember where I got it. I told the class, after we talked about what kind of writing could come from the picture, that it was time to start and to get writing.

One young man, who I promised would remain nameless here, wasn't getting started. He was just sitting there. I stage whispered to him, "Nameless--it's time to get writing, man."

He looked up at me with a direct challenge in his eyes and said, "I don't want to write."

I looked at him in mock horror as I could feel the eyes of the rest of the class stealing over to the scene. They wanted to know how I would handle it. Would I yell at him, threaten him, ignore him and let him get a zero? Was this a path they wanted to follow him down?

I said in my best fake choked-up voice, "You don't want to write?"

Then I literally fell to my knees in front of his desk, clasped my hands together in supplication and began to wail in best theatrical voice, "Oh, Nameless, PLEASE write something! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!"

The rest of the class was silent for a moment. Whatever they expected, it sure wasn't this.

"Please, Nameless," I wailed, false sobs ripping from my chest, "Please write something during journal writing time!!!"

At this point he jumped up out of his desk and started backing away from me as the class dissolved into helpless laughter. I followed on my knees still begging him in my best theatrical manner to write.

He returned to his seat and picked up his pencil. The look in his eyes said he wasn't sure if he should be angry at me for the show I was putting on or scared that I really was a crazy man. I began to implore him. "Nameless, all you have to do to make me stop is to write something in your journal. Please writne one little thing in your journal so I can stop doing this!!"

He relented and began to write in the journal. As he finished his first word he looked up at me to see what effect it would have on my weird behavior.

Still on my knees I raised my hands into the air and shouted, "Halleluja! He's writing! Nameless is writing!!!" Still fake sobbing, now in joy, I rose to my feet, dusted off my knees, looked at the rest of the class and asked in my normal voice, "Is there anybody else who desn't want to write in their journal today?"

The room was silent except for the scribbling of pens and pencils on paper.

All in all, it was one of my better performances.