Teaching in "The Show"

“What if I roll three fives in a row and then fall out of my chair – do I still get to go again?”  “What if I get done reading the page after three other people but before 12 others and I have to go to the bathroom?”  “What if the sun shines tomorrow but the wind doesn’t blow and then it rains for three minutes…will we still have recess?”  “What if” questions from students drive me bonkers.  While I applaud the creativity used to generate such queries they are very rarely relevant to real life possibilities. 

When I saw the topic for the current #innovatorsmindset blog hop…

…I developed an annoyed mindset.  However, much like my primary students, I instantly lost focus on the annoyance and realized I had been kicking a “What if” idea around for quite a while:  What if the teaching profession was more like Major League Baseball?

**What if we discard the current model of spending several years in college learning nothing about real teaching and replace it with apprenticeship in the “minor leagues”?  Prospective teachers could spend a year in a primary school, another year in a middle school, and one more in a high school.  They will “get the call” to the big leagues (their first job) with three years of experience and skills honed for their chosen position.

**What if we started the school year in March, preceded by “spring training” for teachers – two weeks in Florida or Arizona as a staff preparing for the upcoming year by studying scouting reports (Pinterest and TpT), attending team meetings (pool-side), and doing drill work on fundamentals (copier error correction, peripheral vision, and conflict resolution).  (side note:  The spring training trip doesn’t appeal to me at all, but I suspect normal folks might enjoy it).

**What if teachers could become free agents after six years and “test the market” for a more lucrative contract?  Think of the possibilities for students if schools were competing for the best teachers and those teachers were distinguishing themselves in several statistical categories:  home runs, sacrifice bunts, sacrifice flies, stolen bases, innings pitched, batting average, and strikeouts.

            Home runs – Each day a teacher gets a student to succeed at something they couldn’t do yesterday – HOME RUN!!  We’d shatter Barry Bonds’ “records”.

            Sacrifices – Give a bit of yourself (time, experience, money, etc.) to help a colleague and earn a sacrifice bunt on the scorecard.  Do the same to help the school community and earn a sacrifice fly.

            Stolen bases – How many new and innovative ideas have you found elsewhere and brought to your school for the betterment of all?

            Innings pitched – Each hour spent preparing to teach, teaching, regrouping after teaching, and learning how to teach better is an inning.  Unlike the big leagues we don’t have bullpen help available so our innings pitched are really gonna pile up.

            Batting Average – Love them or hate them, test results can tell a story.  Your batting average is the percentage of your students who reach testing targets.

            Strikeouts – Gotta take a peek at some negative statistics when measuring the complete player….er, teacher.  How many kids did you just not reach this year?  Each one is a strikeout.  Probably don’t want a high strikeout rate – kinda makes your other stats irrelevant.

After six years of compiling these stats we waltz into our district office and announce “I’d like a five year guaranteed contract worth $8.6 million per year with an optional sixth year at $10 million or I’m taking my talents to South Beach!”

**What if throngs of people cheered our every swing, pitch, or catch (lesson, joke, or pat on the back)?  Or if we left the school building and had to sign autographs for a half-hour before getting to our car?  What if our great math lesson from 1:30 was splashed across the 6:00 news that same night?

**What if we had a 162 day season, just like MLB?  Wait, hold on – that’s fewer days than I teach now.  Can’t shorten our season and expect better results.  Playoffs can add up to 21 extra games to a team’s season, though, so that’s a little better number.  Oooooh, we’ve got to come up with some sort of playoff system for education, too!

I feel the little bit of sanity I started with on this topic draining away.  It’s fun to dream, it’s fun to innovate, it’s fun to teach…and it’s fun to play baseball.  What if we could combine the four?

Scratching Out A New School, The End

I began this three-part blog by comparing the creation of a school from scratch to cooking from scratch.  In part one I presented the process I used to link the two and reveled the main ingredient in my school recipe:  people.  This ingredient was explained in detail in part two, where I laid out my vision for the student and staff structure of my school.  However, upon rereading part two today it became apparent I strayed a bit from my food analogy that was presented in part one.  Part three, therefore, will refocus on the idea of cooking up a school from scratch by sharing some ingredients used by many schools which I consider additives, preservatives, and artificial flavorings that would only diminish the wholesome, natural health of my school.  To begin, my school from scratch will not have:

GRADE LEVELS – I touched on this in part two.  Why do we place a student who reads 20 words a minute a “grade” ahead of a student who reads 120 words in the same minute?  Grade levels are an artificial flavoring that moves kids through school buildings without providing any measurable health benefits.  With respect to behavioral and academic needs, assigning kids to grade levels has enough abstractness to be completely meaningless to the students and their parents.  We tell kids to “act like a second grader” – yet do they, or we, even know exactly how a second grader should act?  To expand this category a bit, my school will also NOT have…

LABELS – We will not waste resources determining if a student is Title I, SPED, ADHD, or any other useless label that does nothing but give students, parents, and teachers an excuse to lower expectations for results.  Labels are akin to preservatives, which allow us to let food sit unused longer than we would leave unpreserved food untouched.  All students will carry the same label:  “learner”.  Some learners will achieve performance levels faster than others….but all will achieve.  Without labels, our school will need fewer….

COMMITTEES – Teachers carry a large enough burden trying to meet needs inside their classrooms; placing committee additives upon them only lessens their ability to provide healthy instruction.  And without committees we will waste less time in…

MEETINGS – Collaboration amongst staff to discuss reading instruction, math centers, or classroom management techniques?  Powerful.  Sitting around a table to figure out which days we should have potlucks and wear school colors?  Somebody shoot me.  Meetings are the processed food products of schools; everything about them seems real, but in the end they leave us feeling empty.  We make agendas, we get department reps, we follow protocols, we take notes, and at the end of the meeting…somebody is tasked with doing what he/she could have done alone without having to meet and gotten it done in less time than the meeting took.  If we could turn even 50% of meeting time into collaboration time, we could also eliminate another processed product my school will not have:

INSTRUCTIONAL SERIES – My school will NOT waste tens of thousands of dollars on a tool that decreases the flavor of a classroom.  Anyone can blandly turn the pages of a teacher’s manual, regurgitate the script contained within, and call himself a teacher; teachers in my school will chart their own courses towards standard achievement.  Breaking away from “the series” was one of the most powerful decisions I made as a classroom teacher.  It forced me to plan better, think harder, and create more than I ever had to as a page-turner.  More importantly, my students were forced to do the same.  Instructional series are written for the average student; I prefer teaching to produce exceptional students.  Which means we will also eliminate most….

TECHNOLOGICAL GADGETRY – I am not sure I can condense my entire argument against this monetary black hole in education into a paragraph.  My school will be extremely careful about the type and amount of computer technology we use in our instruction.  There is no bigger artificial flavoring in schools today, yet I know there is potential for academic growth via technology.  My concern lies with the vast amount of education our youngest students miss when staring at screens.  Consider this graphic on skills graduates will need to land a job:

I see at least seven items in each list that absolutely cannot be developed by staring at a screen, items that revolve around human interaction.  And with the way technology rapidly changes I often wonder why we immerse our young students into technology that will be obsolete by the time they reach high school.  My school will teach how to work, play, argue, and problem solve with other humans.  We will give interpersonal skills the same importance as academic skills.  We will teach kids to appreciate the world they actually live in.  We will be physically active.  In short, it will be hard to justify using machines that inhibit our basic philosophies about education.  Speaking of inhibit, a final ingredient our school will leave out of the batter is…

TEACHER UNIONS – I will continue for the three of you that have not just disgustedly spat on my blog.  Unions are an antiquated preservative that exist to preserve one thing – the unions.  An entity created to protect an uneducated workforce has managed to dupe an educated workforce into thinking we still need a union to take care of us.  Unions are not concerned about students, nor are they truly concerned about teachers.  Unions exist to keep union leaders in power and in money.  My money, your money, our money.  To keep themselves powerful the leaders hold the rest of us back, looking down upon outliers who work long hours or (gasp!) collaborate with administrators.  I have watched our local union invade my school building over the last five years, slowly eroding the spirit of teamwork and effort that used to make us a great educational facility.  We are now mediocre, with fewer and fewer staff willing to give without being guaranteed a give-back.  My school from scratch will fight against unionized mediocrity by striving for collaborative greatness.  We will work long hours and collaborate with administration to produce better students.  We will work with a spirit of giving more than we expect to get, the spirit that our country was built upon and has been protected with…..no thanks to unions.

And with that I will call my school from scratch officially……condemned, probably.  It concerns me that the list of things I would not have is longer than the list of what I would have; does it speak to my vision being incomplete or to the current state of most schools?  I suppose it doesn’t matter much, seeing as how this was supposed to be just a fun exercise.  In the end I feel as though most of the subjects I touched on could have had their own blog – and perhaps have come across as under-described.  I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I really hope you have done some thinking, or will do some thinking, about what does and does not make a school.