Openers, bell ringers and to-dos

The above title lists three names for the same activity. Educational jargon is a moving target. I don’t understand how we teachers all suddenly seemed to know that an opener had become a to-do, but we did. Maybe the aliens used the techno-ray on us, as my young daughter might have said. In any case, your school will have a name for that 5-10 minute opening activity.

To-dos matter. The government is tracking student attendance. Low numbers invite scrutiny and even sanctions. There’s $$ in those numbers, too. Many administrations are keeping close watch over attendance figures. You want to put attendance in within the first ten minutes of class. I recommend against the first two or three minutes. Too soon and you will have to remember to fix the tardies you have marked absent. You definitely don’t want to get attendance wrong.

The right opener makes taking attendance easy. Conventional wisdom now seems to push five-minute openers, probably because of our feverish preoccupation with maximizing text scores and increasing available time for bell-to-bell instruction, but I personally prefer to run a little longer sometimes. As long as students are productively engaged, why not give yourself 7, 8 or even 10 minutes? The problem with the five-minute opener — oops, to-do — lies in the increasing time demands that are being placed on teachers. I am convinced that science experiments declined in my district last year due to these demands. Our prep periods always ended up being filled with meetings and attempts to enter student data into new spreadsheets, creating a tendency to avoid activities in lesson plans that might require a possibly nonexistent prep period.

Let the lesson plan determine the to-do. Slightly-longer to-dos may allow you to set up more complex lessons involving manipulatives, for example. Your target should be to use the shortest time you can get away with while still gracefully getting ready for class. As time and content expectations grow ever more demanding, teachers can sometimes end up seeming rushed or even frantic. Students don’t respond well to rushed or frantic, at least not as a regular occurrence.

Take the time you need to get set up and still enjoy your students. You want a minute or two to ask Daisy how her new, little brother is doing, for example. You want to be able to help Travis get organized. The first few minutes of a class set the tone for that class. Yes, you need to do the attendance piece, but you also want to create a class ready for learning.

Eduhonesty: That said, if administration turns up, you need to get out of your to-do quickly. The short to-do has become a best practice and you mess with best practices at your peril. Best practices will affect or even be used to determine your evaluation numbers.

To-dos should always be activities students can do without you. If students come up to you for help, find classmates to fill in the gaps. The right seating chart can help, allowing you to pair helpful and struggling students. If too many students come up for help, a to-do should be dropped or turned into an exit slip instead.

I have been known to holler, “Abandon ship!” and pass out a back-up opener. If you misjudged class readiness, you don’t need to slog through the growing confusion. Make a joke or two, pass out something easier and come back to the failed opener later.

Help me find newbies?

This has been the “top-secret blog of gloom and doom,” as I sometimes call it, for a long time. I don’t advertise. I am only now beginning to hand out the URL somewhat freely. I actually pay a software company to make me hard to find. To someone who long ago received a graduate degree in marketing, this blog seems pretty silly sometimes. It costs ME money. But the idea behind my low profile was not to get fired, a reasonable goal, I’m sure readers will agree.

However, since my latest posts are intended to help new teachers, I would like to reach some new teachers. Do you know a new teacher? Or a weary teacher? I am writing for the weary, too. Please pass on this URL if you do. I want to help.

I worked too hard

This post is for newbies and the weary. Especially the weary.

A few years ago, my father-in-law was placed in a convalescent facility. He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years and he had reached the point where he could no longer eat. He was tube-fed and miserable. Dementia was beginning to set in. He would try to do long division and become upset when he could no longer remember the steps. He kept seeking out his deficits and then railing against them. I visited sometimes, but I did not visit enough. At the end of the day, I was tired, sometimes even exhausted, and I just went home.

I am reminded of that old saying by Rabbi Harold Kushner: “Nobody on their deathbed has ever said ‘I wish I had spent more time at the office.'” 

Those missed visits remain a strong regret. My father-in-law was a fascinating man, a teacher who had risen from a childhood in South Chicago as a poor, immigrant child of a single mother to become a textbook author and President of the Illinois Foreign Language Teachers Association. I wish I had sat at his bedside more often, breaking up his boredom and listening to him reminisce. 

Eduhonesty: In many schools now, teaching can suck up every waking hour if you let it. Government and administrative requirements get piled on top of the work itself, while preparation time gets stolen by new data demands. The rapid pace required to keep classes flowing well without available preparation time adds stress as teachers become inundated by tasks on lengthening to-do lists.

I am going to add another recommendation for new teachers: Put family and personal time specifically on your calendar. Years ago, I did this when my classes at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University were overwhelming me. I was never caught up. I never could catch up. In the interests of sanity, I declared most of Saturday a work and study-free zone, a time for relaxation.

I suggest teachers who are swamped do the same. Put your personal and family time specifically into your calendar. Depending on where you are working, you may never catch up. If you consistently have 18 hours of work per day but only 16 waking hours available, you will be triaging. Many teachers are juggling crazy loads, as are professionals in other fields. When this country passed Japan to earn the dubious honor of longest work-week in the world, alarms should have been going off all over the place, yet somehow U.S. workers just kept slogging along.

I would like to spare my fellow educators regrets about missed childhood and eldercare opportunities. Put family on the calendar. Buy ice cream and make banana splits. Stash the phones and iPads. Email Aunt Doris. Call grandpa. And take time to pamper yourself a little. You will burn out if you don’t.

Put the work down. Zoom a beer and cheese tasting with a friend. Order pizza and sit down to Turner Classic Movies with your spouse. Spare an hour to talk about Tom Cruise, your favorite Netflix series, or anything else that does not relate to education or politics.

Not only will you be happier, you will be a better teacher. Too much work becomes drudgery and kids will sense when your energy is flagging. The best teachers bring passion to their work. That passion will be stronger if you allow yourself fun and family time. In a nutshell, on the seventh day, carve out time to rest. Try to take that sixth day off, too. 

Glub glub glub

For the newbies, taken from an old voice memo:

“Schoology, Sarah at Teaching Channel, Brian at Hero, Education Weekly, the nice lady from the recent professional development who created a Dropbox for me, the various district newsletters we are publishing on the internet. I have all of this to look at, not to mention the real stuff. I need to look at my students notes, lesson plans, suggestions for materials from colleagues. I need to look at tests that are being sent to me so I can give feedback. I need to evaluate study guides. A colleague sent me four videos from a presenter of a past professional development that I really liked. I’ve got information on tests, on trainings, on websites. I have a new math resource program for which I still don’t have much information. I have to find out about it. I have a bunch of weird stuff from the Board Office which probably needs to be dealt with.”

This short snippet captures teaching life in a time when sometimes teachers have almost no prep time available because of data requirements and meetings. Some new teachers will be able to dictate their own versions of this voice memo soon. The amount of work can quickly reach the overwhelming stage.

I recommend a version of the medical system of triage. Leave the stuff that will fix itself alone. Get to work as fast as you can on emergencies that will benefit from your help. And let those problems that are beyond help go, offering palliative care to manage the pain. What matters? Student learning matters. Assisting colleagues matters. Keeping administration happy matters. I’d triage using a personal list that went in that order: students, colleagues, administration. If you are new to the field, you might want to bump administration up to the front. Scratch exploring great new ideas from professional developments unless you can apply them immediately. Scratch going out to find new software or pre-prepared lesson plans that will have to be adapted to match Common Core or state standards. If you have to do much adapting, you are probably better off writing your own plan. You’ll understand that plan better.

With the above list, I let Sarah go. No time. Ditto Brian. I may have listened to them briefly, but I did not have time to use them as resources. I did read articles in Education Weekly, but only if those articles were pertinent to my immediate situation. I never did use the Dropbox since Google Docs were the district preference. I scanned the newsletters. District happenings can have a large and fast impact on individual schools. I evaluated tests and study guides, emailing colleagues with my thoughts. I skipped the four videos. No time. I studied more tests, so many tests. I would end up spending over 10% of my year in standardized and benchmark testing, not including my own quizzes and grade-wide unit tests. I let the guy across the hall recommend professional development. I ignored the world wide web for the most part, since I had enough software to keep my classes busy for the next five years at least. That math resource program proved to be a time-suck and years above the actual learning level of almost every single one of my students, but the program was nonetheless required. Students put in at least an hour each week. My higher-scoring students benefited from the program. The others were lost and mostly guessed or got help from friends, who were often guessing as well. I tried to help. While the computer groups were hacking away at the required math program, though, someone had to be introducing new material somewhere. I’m sure I did the weird stuff from the Board Office, whatever that was.

Eduhonesty: The greatest challenge in teaching today is finding time to teach. We are inundated with data and testing demands and tools to use to push up the numbers, when sometimes what we most need is simply to be left alone. Left alone, we can teach Layla fractions and Alex polynomial equations. Left alone, we can find out what our students know and prepare materials that are one step or even giant leap above that level. Finding those materials and identifying student interests takes time, however, and time seems to be the one commodity that is often in gruesomely short supply.

I’ll make three recommendations for new teachers here:

1) Don’t let work pile up. Don’t let the grading go. You can be buried in papers by the week-end. Blam! There goes your whole week-end, Saturday to grading and Sunday to preparing next week’s lessons.
2) Ask colleagues for help. If you don’t know the new math resource program, someone else probably does. Even when frazzled by their own time demands, most experienced teachers will find time to help a new colleague. Teachers teach. It’s coded in their DNA, I think. If you are lucky, you will have a colleague who can lend you his or her own PowerPoints, activity sheets and lesson plans from the past. Borrow any freebies that will work.
3) Buy lecture materials when you must. Teachers Pay Teachers may have exactly the PowerPoint on the Revolutionary War that your class needs to see.

I love to make PowerPoints. My PowerPoints are filled with pictures, memes and critical-thinking questions. But for standard topics, reinventing the wheel consumes chunks of time that may not exist. Do yourself a favor. In a time-crunch, go to Teachers Pay Teachers and give Sally Ann Smith in Omaha a few dollars for her own brainchild. You can adapt a newly purchased PowerPoint to meet your classes’ content requirements in minutes usually, leaving hours free to catch up on your grading, student data requirements, etc.

When you absolutely must have a helicopter to get off the mountain

Regular readers of this blog know that I often tend toward the speculative and theoretical. I want to go sideways on my posts for newbies and comment instead on an interesting article at NPR about the overparenting crisis. (http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/08/28/434350484/how-schools-are-handling-an-overparenting-crisis) I’d like to observe that I’ve mostly worked in academically and financially-disadvantaged schools so overparenting as a phenomenon has seldom impacted my work life. In my last district, we were working to decrease the drop-out rate, not increase the percentage of admissions to Ivy League schools. We viewed any high school graduate who chose to go to any college as a success story. In addition, in my experience, bilingual students are seldom overparented. Their parents may help land them jobs, but they don’t expect to attend any job interviews. Those parents don’t do science projects for their children. Often, they can’t do science projects for their children because their children speak better English than they do.

In any case, NPR interviewed two authors, Julie Lythcott-Haims and Jessica Lahey. I offer up the following for thought:

Lahey: Teachers and administrators complain about parents, but we helped create this frenzy.

One mother told me she was willing to step back, but felt like she could not because the standards have moved for what constitutes an A on a science project. Teachers have come to accept that parents interfere and co-opt school projects, and have begun to take that for granted when grading.

Lythcott-Haims: The other way in which high schools in particular play into the dynamic is during the college admission process, where they feel judged based on the brand names of the colleges their seniors get into, and their incentive is to brag about that.

Eduhonesty: As we raise standards and increase the emphasis on test scores as measures of life success, I can see why parents might rush into the gap between our expectations and what can realistically be expected. We don’t want to let our children fail. The article observes that letting students do their own work, and possibly fail to get that high grade, will prove beneficial to those students. I’d like to ask a couple of questions, though.

How did we come to this? How did we reach the point where a “B” became dubious and a “C” became unacceptable? When did we decide grades mattered more than learning? When a parent does Jackie’s homework, that effort costs Jackie learning even as it raises her grade. Many parents now believe that their child needs an “A” average to get into an acceptable college and they also believe that only certain colleges measure up in terms of prestige and future earning power. How did we become this frantic? The cost of our data and grade-obsession may be much higher than many educational bureaucrats and leaders realize.

I’ll end this post with a quote from Jessica Lahey, who said it as well as I ever could: “As long as we continue to worship grades over learning, scores over intellectual bravery and testable facts over the application of knowledge, kids will never believe us when we tell them that learning is valuable in and of itself.”

Rolling those ADHD dice

(Still posting mostly for the newbies as they try to figure out what’s going on in their first year.)

From the http://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/facts-statistics-infographic#2 article on the rising rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) among America’s children:

Cases and diagnoses of ADHD have been increasing dramatically in the past few years. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) says that 5 percent of American children have ADHD. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts the number at more than double the APA’s number. The CDC says that 11 percent of American children, ages 4 to 17, have the attention disorder. That’s an increase of 42 percent in just eight years.

ADHD & Other Conditions
ADHD doesn’t increase a person’s risk for other conditions or diseases. But some people with ADHD — especially children — are more likely to experience a range of co-existing conditions. They can sometimes make social situations more difficult or school more challenging.

Some co-existing conditions include:

learning disabilities
conduct disorders and difficulties, including antisocial behavior, fighting, and oppositional defiant disorder
anxiety disorder
depression
bipolar disorder
Tourette’s syndrome
substance abuse
bed-wetting problems
sleep disorders
– See more at: http://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/facts-statistics-infographic#5

I strongly suggest reading this article.

In abstract terms, these numbers suggest that a teacher with 30 kids in a class on average will have around 3 students who suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In practical terms, every class, every year will be another roll of the dice. You may walk in to find four kids with ADHD in your homeroom of 22 kids. The conventional wisdom has this condition growing more prevalent in the population, like autism. I believe that wisdom. The numbers of kids bouncing off the walls does seem to be increasing. How much of the ADHD increase results from increasing diagnoses, rather than genuine change, I don’t know, but the numbers of kids on meds has unquestionably been increasing.

I want to throw in one more set of observations from the article with the caveat that these are generalizations and some girls manifest ADHD exactly like boys do. I dislike gender generalizations, but I am adding these because atypical symptoms of ADHD do not receive enough focus. In particular, inattentiveness often results in classroom struggles between student and teacher. Teachers can take inattentiveness personally when that inattentiveness has little, or nothing, to do with them.

Boys tend to display externalized symptoms that most people think of when they think of ADHD behavior, for example:

impulsivity or “acting out”
hyperactivity, such as running and hitting
lack of focus, including inattentiveness
physical aggression
ADHD in girls is often easy to overlook because it’s not “typical” ADHD behavior. The symptoms aren’t as obvious as they are in boys. They can include:

being withdrawn
low self-esteem and anxiety
intellectual impairment and difficulty with academic achievement
inattentiveness or a tendency to “daydream”
verbal aggression: teasing, taunting, or name-calling
– See more at: http://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/facts-statistics-infographic#6

Eduhonesty: I recently wrote a post asking for kindness and understanding for the quiet students. This post is for the ADHD kids. They tend to be loud. They leap out of their seats or fidget endlessly. They cause fights. They interrupt and then interrupt your speech about not interrupting. In the middle of math, they will pipe up to say, “I saw a fire engine yesterday.” When you are explaining the procedures for the assembly, they will ask, “How old is the oldest tree in the world?” Frequently they make the class laugh, not always intentionally. They often fall behind academically, although not always. ADHD runs in my family but my kids and I have been “A” students despite this fact.

The movie “Talladega Nights” has a great line: “I don’t know what to do with my hands.” Ricky Bobby was speaking for kids everywhere when he said that line, and for a lot of adults, too. Part of managing ADHD students is understanding that, yes, our ADHD students truly don’t know what to do with their hands since they don’t know how to keep those hands still. They don’t know how to sit attentively listening for more than a few minutes. Some kids are daydreamers and they slip into those dreams like Alice falling down the Rabbit Hole, alighting far from that lesson on fractions droning on in the background.

I suspect the acting out, physical aggression, low self-esteem, anxiety and verbal aggression listed above stem in part from that sense of failure that comes from not meeting expectations. Stress alone may account for more than a sliver of the uptick in ADHD diagnoses. Stress levels are rising. As testing takes up more class time and becomes more heavily emphasized, teachers need to be clear that we are making some challenged students feel like failures far too often.

On a practical level, I’d like to offer some suggestions to help with ADHD students.

Teach students to make and keep a to-do list. Teaching them how to use phones for this purpose will help them enormously. The sooner they learn to use smartphones and apps to remind the of appointments and deadlines, the better. Setting reminders can be problematic — beep, beep, beep. Still, reminder rules can be agreed upon, allowing for the occasional beep in unusual times.
alexis
For students who don’t have smartphones, agendas and notebooks work fine. If your school issues agendas, great. If not, buy a few cheap notebooks (or actual agendas if they have them) at the Dollar Store and give these to students who need help organizing themselves. Check written agendas before and after school. Help your students to make a daily to-do list and remind them to read that list later. Enlisting parents in this effort will improve the odds that lists get read as well as written.

Showing students how to organize themselves requires an extra time commitment on your part, but students (usually) appreciate the extra attention. Many also need the help. Part of the reason why some students suddenly suffer a precipitous academic decline when they enter middle school lies in organizational issues. When one elementary teacher laid out what to do and when to do it, these kids were fine, but that first year of six teachers with six different assignments can blow kids right out of the water, whether they have attention deficit issues or not. Many students can’t compartmentalize six sets of expectations with four different worksheets and three reading assignments, not in their heads anyway. Without help, some kids will begin stuffing books and assignments randomly into their locker, never taking them out of that locker, and never looking back. A few will do the assignments, stuff the completed assignments in their locker, lose them, and never turn them in.

Tips for managing that ADHD component of any classroom:

♦ Help your students get organized.
♦ Make them write out daily to-do lists.
♦ Don’t take inattentiveness personally. Some kids just live in a field of rabbit holes.
♦ Learn techniques to reclaim the attention of drifting kids. Do something out of the ordinary. Bells work. Singing works.
♦ Find fidget toys or activities to keep wandering hands occupied. If you type “fidget toys” into google, you will find numerous options, many of them inexpensive.
♦ Don’t get upset about the “blurts” that pop up. If my assembly instructions were interrupted, I’d say something like, “Right now, we have to go over the assembly rules. If you want, we can look up the oldest tree after school or at lunch.” Then I’d look up the tree. (The tree is named Methuselah. At 4,846 years old, this ancient, bristlecone pine can be found in the Inyo National Forest in California, but the forest service doesn’t let people know Methulelah’s specific location for the tree’s protection.)
♦ Encourage ADHD students — and all students — to exercise. Push them to join the soccer team if possible. Sinking excess energy into sports helps kids focus later.
♦ Encourage ADHD students — and all students — to eat well. I’m not sure if a diet of Flamin Hot Red Squiggly Things makes behavior worse, but I can’t see the remotest benefit to living on spicy-hot, squiggly things. Fruits and vegetables may help. They can’t hurt.
♦ Appreciate your ADHD students. I would never have known about the world’s oldest tree if not for one boy who was a joy to have in class despite his many interruptions.
♦ Empathize with the struggles of ADHD students. When they say, “I try, Ms. Q, I really do, but then I just forget to take the homework home,” believe them. Then try to come up with a system that will help them to remember the homework.
♦ Let your ADHD kids know you are on their side. You want them to succeed. Then work together with them to find the individual plans that will help with their particular issues. “I can’t do the work and then I get mad” requires a different plan than “I have to get out of my seat. I hate to sit.”
♦ Get help. Find out if your ADHD student has a social worker. Talk to counselors and social workers for advice.
♦ Have students bring all books and materials every day.
♦ Regular routines help ADHD and other students. Don’t vary your routines too often.

This last tip always proved hard for me. I am ADHD enough so that routines don’t appeal to me and sudden inspirations can make me change course in the middle of the river. As time went by, though, I realized that certain kids needed regular routines. Those routines helped them manage stress and helped them manage classroom procedures.

Simplifying procedures improves everyone’s life. If all students have to bring all materials every day, then students won’t forget to bring the fungus textbook or their markers. Class can start without supply issues. Students don’t have to feel that they messed up again when they missed the previous day’s instructions on the fungus book and markers. Anything that can be a routine, should be a routine. Routines free class time for learning and decrease the stress and challenges that students, especially ADHD students, face daily.

(I read my last paragraph and I think, “ooh, that sounds boring.” But especially for new teachers, routines are your friend. If the kids always pick up the opener from a table by the door and know what to do with that opener from previous practice, you have freed 5-10 minutes to take attendance and handle individual student issues. Students can settle down. You can complete clerical tasks. Routines free us to work on content, rather than classroom management, and content’s almost always much more fun than management.)

If you can handle the heels

shoe

A couple of years ago, I sat quietly through an honest discussion in the social studies office of a large, suburban high school.

“I have natural advantage because I’m a guy,” a colleague said to the group. “It’s harder for women. I walk into the room and they know to be quiet.”

I did not disagree. The ability to project authority remains an underexplored aspect of teaching, That little Greek woman I wrote about a few posts back? No one would have stuck gum in her hair — certainly not two or three times — if she had been a 6′ 2″ guy. Not that being a guy necessarily provides protection. My graduate school teaching cohort had two older men in it, both imposing in terms of size. I remember a discussion with one of the two. We were talking about the fact that our third cohort member appeared to be having trouble finding his place in the educational world.

“I hear he has trouble controlling his classes,” my colleague said, voice whispery and low, as if he were imparting a disgraceful secret.

My colleague was working and coaching in one of the toughest schools in the area. Classroom management came easily to him. Being the patriarch of a large, Irish Catholic family had prepared him to take control of his classes and he did not seem to understand why his graduate-school classmate might be struggling.

So much goes into projecting authority. Small women as a group may be at a disadvantage, but many learn to manage classes with little difficulty. Some are obvious naturals. Physical appearance has much less to do with projecting authority than attitude. A 100 pound woman can hush students by walking into a room if she knows in her bones that she has the conn.

Eduhonesty: YOUR classroom, your rules. Internalizing that fact will make life much easier.

Having made these observations, I’m going to go out on a slightly controversial limb here. If you are not that big guy who naturally knows what to do, not a patriarch or matriarch, and are feeling some lack of respect in the classroom, then you might want to pay attention to your wardrobe. Fair or not, looking sloppy can undercut authority. More tailored clothing helps to create an authoritative image. One of the best teachers I know stands only a little over 5′ 2″, but you might never realize that. In addition to a tendency to automatically try to take command of just about any situation, she dresses up in coordinated casual wear, often with a tailored jacket, and wears shoes that add three or more inches to her height. If you wear can those heels gracefully, you might benefit by adding a few pairs to your wardrobe. Extra inches never hurt, at least if you can wear them without wobbling. I’d advise men to ditch the t-shirts and keep facial hair trimmed, but not fussy.

I’ll end with a short list of clothing that should mostly be avoided, although these aren’t rules as much as guidelines. If you are wearing skinny jeans to class and your classes seem to be going great, then I personally can’t see a reason to change out of those jeans and your My Little Pony t-shirt, assuming no one in administration has complained. This post is for new teachers who are finding the classroom management piece daunting. How you look will affect how your students see you.

I suggest you save the following for the week-end:

♦ Jeans with glitter or holes in them — no matter how artfully the fabric may have been ripped
♦ Super tight skinny jeans, even if they fit
♦ Low V-necks
♦ T-shirts with sayings across the chest
♦ See-through fabrics
♦ Super-short skirts

Make it bright, make it YOU

Are you decorating your first classroom?

I always loved setting up my room. A good classroom becomes a bit battered by year’s end, as student work goes up and down, school events are posted, and poster paper inside shiny, paper borders gets nicked or ripped in the process. No doubt some teachers replace that poster paper. I usually just covered the holes with yet more original student creations. My planning periods were always sucked up by meetings and other demands. Poster paper replacement never had a chance to make it onto the to-do list. Every August, though, I got my chance to set the world right again.

Classrooms are highly personal so I don’t intend to offer much advice.

♦ If you are short of money, ask Facebook friends, as well as teachers around you, if they have any extra posters or classroom décor.
♦ Buy those bright, shiny borders. In terms of bang for your buck, store-bought borders add pizzazz that construction paper simply cannot match.
bordersforblog
♦ Do you like superheroes? Some interests are natural connection points with kids. An Ironman motivational poster is a win. Minions may be on the way out, but I have gotten a lot of mileage from little yellow creatures with masks and goggles.
♦ Students were intrigued by my Black Jack Pershing poster when I taught social studies. A few quirks never hurt.

For more tips, see my June 15, 2015 post.

Last eduhonesty observation: When administration walks in, they will be looking for student work on the walls. Don’t neglect this step. Your evaluation will consist of a series of snapshots taken over far too short a time period. Student work can help prejudice that process in your favor.

No free time?

I did give a little free time last year. If my homeroom class won the attendance challenge for the week, the school provided them treats. I let them eat their chips, drink their little water bottles, and take ten minutes on those days. Those free minutes posed no threat to the bigger instructional picture. They were tied to a specific performance target.

In my last post, I pushed hard against “free time,” though, and I know I am getting some push-back. Like me, many teachers are probably saying, “But kids aren’t machines!”

They’re not machines. They need breaks. We need breaks. I am 100% in favor of recess. In fact, I am in favor of nap time in the early elementary grades.

The problem with free time can be captured in Ben Stein’s latte effect. If I buy a soy, green tea Frappuccino on my way home from work, I have spend $5. That $5 seems like a relatively small sum of money in return for a delicious drive home. The problem arises when I pull into that drive-through every day. After one September of teaching, I have spent 22 * 5 = $110. Over the course of the school year, I can spend 180 * 5 = $900. Nine-hundred dollars can buy me a plane ticket to Europe, or provide me with hotel fees and show tickets for a long week-end at a nearby Shakespearean festival.
edcup

The temptation to give free time at the end of a class period may be strong.

“We did our work! Yeah, you said you liked my project! We need a break!”

By middle school, some children have become great salespeople.

“You look tired, Ms. Q. You have been working really hard. Why don’t you just sit down at your computer and relax. We could all look at some YouTube. We won’t cause any trouble. Yeah, you deserve a break, Ms. Q! Why don’t we look at funny falls? No, soccer! No, whatever Ms. Q wants!”

Twenty-some solicitous thirteen-year-old adolescents may be looking up front with expressions of compassion and helpfulness. Let us help you find YouTube, those expressions say. You can rest. We will locate that video with skateboarder who ended up in the tree and we can all have some laughs.

After a long day, that video sounds great, but this post again is for the newbies: Don’t give in as a regular practice. Right before Thanksgiving break, when the work’s done, fine. But on any regular day leading into another regular day, that free time request is trouble. Once you give in, the demand for free time will never go away. Once you start making any regular practice of free time, you will lose 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there until by the end of the year, you may have sacrificed — let’s consider those free minutes Frappuccinos — 5 * 180 = 900 minutes or 15 hours of instructional time, or 2 full days.

Do we need breaks? Yes. I suggest crossword puzzles or other word games. Art activities also work great. Hand out construction paper and markers so students can draw the parts of a flower or whatever you are studying. But free time, like lattes, ought to be saved for special occasions.

Plan B, C, or D

Continuing my classroom management posts…

In some previous scrap of writing, I included a bit about back-up plans for lessons that go awry. As the school year starts, I want to emphasize that idea. At some point, the internet will go out in your school. Or your computer will die. Perhaps a presentation will inexplicably evaporate into cyberspace. Critical cables connecting your computer to the smartboard will vanish during the night. You may suddenly realize that you transposed steps in the nitrogen cycle and cannot use your PowerPoint or Google Doc. The administration will schedule a sudden assembly that cuts your class in half. Aliens will land in Washington. D.C. Whatever. The set of weird ways that best-laid-plans can be wrecked is no small, finite function. In financially-disadvantaged schools, technology glitches are especially common.

In classroom management terms, downtime may be your worst enemy. Students can fill a learning vacuum with trouble in mere seconds, starting a conversation, pulling out a phone or tossing an insult at the rival gang member across the room. Adolescents hardly ever sit quietly with nothing to do.

Your back-up lesson plan should not be technology dependent. Most of the time, if you need back-up, faulty technology will probably be the reason. I recommend banking language lessons with an additional writing component. To promote engagement, tell students that they will have a spelling* or vocabulary quiz the next day — this can be fast — and that those with good grades will be allowed to substitute that grade for a lower, previous grade on another assignment. Keep this hook in mind generally. If you need students to be engaged, grades work for most.

You can also try a tangential area of interest in your field, such as the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, or the story of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie in 1914. If you have a particular academic passion that doesn’t fit easily into the curriculum, this can be your chance to show what you know. Passion can be catching, too.

No time to prepare any extra lessons? Go look at sharemylesson or the Teachers Pay Teachers website. For some grades, an edhelper.com subscription can be worth the money. A Google search will reveal plenty of sites that offer possible lessons, not all of them for $$.

Your teaching life will be much easier if you always have a lesson plan waiting for days when you need to go sideways. Try to avoid using “your” lesson plan as a sub plan. Substitutes should always receive a plan designed specifically for the day(s) you are absent. But you always want to have a plan B or even a plan C or D for yourself. Maybe you won’t want to use the great Franz Ferdinand plan on a day when one-third of the class is out due to a virus, but you won’t want to teach the planned lesson, either, since that third needs to know why Woodrow Wilson could not sell the League of Nations.

If you don’t have plan C or D, teachers in your building may be able to share their emergency plans. If all else fails, pull out the construction paper and markers and have students draw what you are teaching. In math, you can have them make posters of key conversions such as “1/2 = 50% = 0.5” or have them make up story problems for each other.

In addition to extra lesson plans you prepare, I suggest making subject-specific crosswords and word searches. Multiple websites exist that allow you to do this, such as http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/WordSearchSetupForm.asp?campaign=flyout_teachers_puzzle_wordcross. While not pedagogical heavyweights, word searches and crosswords will rescue a blown-up day. Fill a folder with these search options for the day when you are truly stuck — or the day when your lesson plan runs 20 minutes shorter than you expected. Wordsearches work great for filling in unexpected end-of-period minutes. Crosswords can be a fun group activity. A well-designed crossword can stimulate critical thinking and discussion, too.

I also have always banked a few “Jeopardy” games as well. If I have my computer, I can use these Jeopardy games for review. I keep candy around to use as prizes. If I have three teams, the winning team gets three pieces apiece, second gets two pieces apiece, and last gets one piece apiece. Everyone gets something. I avoid teams that seem too uneven. If Team 1 has too many top students, Teams 2 and 3 may opt out early in the game. Other games work well, too, once the class has become used to the game routine. Blank bingo cards can easily be printed off the internet. A bag of pinto beans, and you will be all set. Students can fill in their own bingo cards: You give them the answers, they decide where to place those answers.

I feel I should add a cautionary note on games. Games can be complicated. They need to be structured, at least until a class has become familiar with the game procedures. Assign any teams yourself. “Find three friends and make a team” may be fun for most students, but it’s also time-consuming and risks some students being excluded. Don’t rearrange teams, either, unless you have very good reason. If you do, the next voice you hear will be saying something like, “But I don’t want Ray on my team!” You have to protect those Rays, the kids who are never chosen.

Eduhonesty: Free time creates disciplinary problems. I recommend advance planning so free time does not happen. I also recommend against using free time as a reward. If you use this reward, you will be fending off requests for free time on a regular basis. A few minutes here, a few minutes there, and pretty soon hours of learning time have been lost. Games or crossword puzzles in groups make better rewards,

*Spelling has gone out of fashion, but many kids still like spelling quizzes. They are easy wins for kids who study in a time when sometimes there are no easy wins, no matter how hard you study.