This post is for long-term readers who see a post and say to themselves, “Wait! She said that before.”

The eduhonesty blog went over 10,000 readers awhile back, so I am sometimes running with topics I know I attacked previously. I hope new readers are digging into the archives, but teachers are inundated with time demands nowadays and I can see that reading my 2012 blog posts will probably not happen very often, at least during the school year. Many teachers are running full-tilt at the dragons they need to slay.

So if time management tips contain a bit of repetition, please let me slide. As I’ve said, I’m trying to help. I’m also making it up as I go while trying to write a book.

Transitions carry a potent latte effect, in dribs and drabs of time rather than money. How are your transitions going? This post is intended for teaching newbies, but everyone who has a job that moves rapidly from task to task can benefit from thinking of transitions as their own temporal versions of a latte.

I first heard about the latte effect from Ben Stein. The idea is straightforward. A vanilla latte can be a delicious treat, but those lattes add up. One $4.00 cup of coffee seems harmless. One month of daily $4.00 coffees adds up to $120, though. That’s not so harmless. In ten months, the lattes total $1,200 or so. That’s airfare or a nice week-end spa break.

Transitions occur when you move from one activity onto the next. Teachers tend to have a day packed with transitions at all levels. Given that students manage transitions with varying degrees of success, some planning and practice can make classroom activities go much smoother. Poorly structured transitions can lead to social chatting, silliness, and even misbehavior and disruptions.

How can you avoid these problems?

Don’t trust the little nippers to know what to do! Or the big nippers! While it’s important to show faith in your students, you may not all be on the same mission. You want to teach the Battle of Shiloh. They want to know if Jaime’s girlfriend really broke up with him, and what she said in those awful text messages.

I suggest verbal warnings combined with actual practice.

♦ Establish clear routines for transition times. Physically practice these routines at the start of year.

Yes, it’s the end of October, but some reinforcement of routines throughout the year can be helpful too, especially if routines are slipping. If your transitions are sucking up valuable classroom minutes unnecessarily, I’d practice now. Try timing transitions. This gives kids the idea that those shifts between activities are supposed to go fast.

♦ Remind students when they need to get started. In the case of an opening activity, that should be as soon as they walk in the room. Don’t let the conversations start. Standing by the door works well. Students should pick up papers to complete from a desk near the door as soon as they walk into the room.

♦ Review your lesson objectives before the lesson begins (or right after you call in or collect the opening activity) and then once more at the end of the lesson. Tell students in advance what activities are planned for period.

♦ Tell students when an activity is ending. Give them a 2 minute or a 5 minute warning.

♦ Tell them where you are going next and when. “We are going to finish plotting points in 2 minutes. You will need to get your book out so that we can look at the material on page 25.”

Two minutes here, three minutes there, three minutes an hour later, and the total minutes lost to slow transitions add up fast. I believe in explaining this to students, along with the math. Show them the minutes. Show them how quickly they can lose hours and even days. Learning various versions of the latte effect will help our students greatly as they get older and begin to buy their own lattes.

The Discrepancy Model is one model used to determine whether or not a student qualifies for special education services. In the past, this model was the gold standard, but other placement strategies have been allowed in the last few years. Many districts still use the Discrepancy Model, though, sometimes in conjunction with other intervention techniques. For readers who are not teachers, here’s a bit of explanation.

In the Discrepancy Model, trained personnel use a child’s IQ or another intelligence measure to determine how well that child should be performing academically. We measure how far a child has fallen behind his peers, with the interesting additional twist that if a child has a lower IQ or intelligence measure, then that child should be falling behind his peers. Under the Discrepancy Model, the discrepancy between a child’s IQ-adjusted age and academic performance must lag by one to two years in order for that child to qualify for special education.

I had a student tested for special education once whose IQ of 78 fell a full 22 points from the 100 point “average.” She did not qualify for services. My student struggled to write even simple words, and her math consisted of nearly random numbers much of the time, but her performance matched her measured IQ and she had missed the district special education low intelligence cut-off by three points.While normally a student must fall behind peers by a year or two in order to qualify for special education help, falling behind is not enough. My student was far behind most of her peers, but her IQ actually kept her out of special education. She was performing up to expectations for her measured intelligence.

Her homework arrived faithfully. She was perhaps my most reliable student. That homework was mostly wrong and sometimes so wrong that I could only be fascinated as I read through three pages of numbers without a discernable pattern.

Another school district’s policy might have resulted in a special education placement for my student, but different areas and districts have different policies depending upon their resources and location. My student remained part of the regular bilingual program. If she had not been lucky enough to qualify for bilingual services, she would have been on her own in a regular classroom, perhaps one of 28 or more math or language arts students, lost and confused as she tried to follow the new content introduced by her teachers.

Eduhonesty: My student’s best piece of luck: She ducked the Common Core. She graduated last year. She never had to take PARCC test. She attended almost all of her classes while flexibility still remained in the classroom.

One test does not fit all. One curriculum does not fit all. I taught that girl that “him” was not spelled “hem.” I don’t know how many times I taught her that. I taught her that “will” was not “well.” Over and over, I worked on words and ideas. I worked with her on adding fractions. She remained years behind her technical grade-level, but she was my student before the Core ruled all content. I was able to differentiate content as well as delivery back in that time. For the sake of all the students like my former student — who was a delight to teach despite the many repetitions required — I wish we could move back in time.

That plan from last year where the bilingual and special education department were required to give exactly the same tests and quizzes as the regular teachers? That plan was crazy. Many of my students last year failed quiz after quiz. When you are doing math at a third grade level, a Common Core-based test written by outsiders at a seventh grade level can only be a disaster. No other outcome is possible despite Field of Dreams rhetoric about not underestimating your students.

Eduhonesty: In the 1800s, when you finished the 3rd grade reader, you went on to the 4th grade reader. You learned math and English step by laborious step. I remain simply bemused by all these so-called educational experts who created the Core. How can they avoid understanding the simple truth that giant leaps in curricular expectations and demands create confusion rather than learning?
 

I have data from last year. I have lots of data, almost all of it from math or language arts. The question that bothers me is this one: Where is my science data? I taught science last year. I attended regular, weekly meetings for science. We planned and executed common instruction. But I collected almost no data.

No one cared. No one demanded that data. My fellow science teachers and I had a fine year and I frankly didn’t and don’t miss the data. You don’t always need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and I’d say our understanding of how instruction had worked was mostly spot on.

Eduhonesty: That said, I am afraid that the absence of that data reflects an unfortunate narrowing of the curriculum on the part of a school district trying desperately to raise scores on the annual state test. We ought to care about science. We ought to care about social studies. We ought to care about Spanish, art and health. The fight to raise test score numbers has been diminishing schools’ focus on lightly-tested or untested subjects that deserve their place in the sun.

Commentators lately have focused on the lack of urban and financially-disadvantaged students pursuing stem careers. I’d say, given the amount of attention given to science in my disadvantaged middle school last year, I may know part of the reason. English and math simply shoved science aside.

(Another set of tips for those who are getting a little desperate for time. Please pass this on to anyone you think might benefit.)

A somewhat crazed-sounding principal in the Bronx recently threw out her teachers’ desks and filing cabinets. She did not want teachers sitting at their desks during class and she solved that problem with one fascinating swoop. Last I heard, the district had reclaimed the desks and they had been stacked in the basement. Check out the pictures.
(http://nypost.com/2015/10/18/principal-forbid-teachers-to-sit-so-she-threw-out-their-desks/)

Overall, I don’t approve. Teachers manage a great deal of paperwork, including classwork, homework, tests, quizzes, data derived from class tests and quizzes, professional development materials, school and district reports, attendance forms, letters, printed mail, printed emails, announcements, future assignments, other teachers’ great ideas, and vital items such as inhalers. I don’t see how a classroom can function efficiently with no teacher desks. Even with filing systems, some days I missed a beat or two, and forgot an assembly reminder or dress code letter that was supposed to go home.

Still, I think that principal might have had something when she threw out the filing cabinets. Efficiency experts estimate that anywhere from 80% to 95% of materials that go into those cabinets never come out. Roach motels should work as well. Papers get lost in filing cabinets, buried in “C” when they should have been in “H.” Failed test forms are put away for reviews that never happen. Possible future lesson materials are buried in piles that surface after their related topic has ended.

This post is for all my readers who are losing papers. It’s also for readers who are regularly digging in and (re)arranging those filing cabinets. How much time do you spend finding or sorting papers? Or worse, rearranging filing cabinet dividers to make your life “easier” and “more manageable.” Here are a few tips to help:

♦ Keep your filing cabinet categories simple. Some possible categories: Tests and quizzes, data (create a separate folder for each class), professional development, parent communications, copies of used assignments for next year, meetings, attendance (if you don’t have or can’t trust your district attendance program), parent-teacher conference night, and IEPs/student needs.

Here’s where the filing process gets tricky. Who are you? Are you the sort of person who rifles through the filing cabinet regularly? If so, you can probably safely add a fair number of additional categories into those metal drawers. But filing cabinets, like purses, tend to be black holes for many people. If you are not a person who peruses filing cabinets, you may want to avoid big, metal boxes. Don’t stuff your great ideas in there. Don’t store reports you need to finish later or announcements that need to go out in the near future. Don’t bury future assignments!

♦ Find shelving that won’t disappear from view.

O.K., I freely admit my blue box from last year looks rather battered and unimpressive now. That box worked great for me, though. I could keep the box by my desk in easy view. I did not store everything there. The finished tests were going into the big metal filing cabinets, for example. I used the blue box for items like make-up assignments and tests (MU) and other papers I might want to grab quickly. I used it for information on the new software program that I could get around to filing later. I used it for temporary storage for impending events, such as parent-teacher night information, and field trip permission trip forms.

♦ I suggest choosing a day each month to stay late for filing. If this task takes more than an hour, you are overthinking your filing or saving too much stuff. If your blue box categories mostly match your filing cabinet categories, you should be able to finish the month’s filing in a few minutes.

♦ I like alphabetizing my filing. Some people prefer color coding. Whatever works best for you, create a system. File papers you expect to use in the next week or two in your handy, blue box. When papers pile up on shelves and counters, teachers sometimes lose necessary papers inside the bigger forest of climbing, white piles. The blue box prevents that.

One caveat: Because this box is easy to get in and out of, you should not store IEP and other confidential materials here.

Eduhonesty: By now, some starting teachers are adding up dollar signs. After all, I just suggested you buy an industrial stapler. If your incidental expenses have begun to feel painful, the right cardboard box will work just fine. You do want a box with a lid, but you could even make that lid. We teachers tend to be naturals at arts and crafts. If not, we keep gluing anyway.

Important note: I just added a caveat to my stapler post from yesterday. Many industrial staplers exist. You want to find a stapler like the one I used and showed in my preceding post. The wrong industrial stapler makes it too easy for Johnny to staple Freddy.

(Another organizational tip for newbies and anyone else who is interested)

This quick tip can make your life unimaginably easier.

Buy one of those industrial staplers, the kind that can staple thirty-some papers into one stack. You will have to buy the special staples that go with your new stapler. Yes, these staplers are expensive. You should stash this stapler so the kids don’t damage it or, worse, staple their own thumbs. Kids can do the darnedest stuff.

(One important caveat: I picked this stapler because no one can easily stable their thumb or another student’s head with this model. Other industrial staplers offer much less protection. If you are going to keep your new stapler in the classroom, even if you intend to keep it inside your desk, you need to avoid models that might lead to trouble. Choose carefully. A stapler that looks like the traditional stapler will be your best bet.)

When you pick up the homework papers from the class inbox, staple them into one group. Among other problems solved, when a kid says, “I turned it in so you must have lost it,” you will be able to immediately address that issue. If it’s in the packet, he turned it in. If not, tell him to check his locker and show him the packet.

(Incidentally, if you are using one inbox, I recommend you go buy a few more cheap, black plastic boxes. Each class should have its own box.)

Grading will often be easier if all the papers are attached to one another, especially with preprinted worksheets. Packets save paper-handling time. Just flip the page and keep flipping.

You might want to alphabetize those papers before you staple them. Papers that won’t be entered into a database obviously don’t need alphabetizing, but if you are going to be plunking numbers into some grading program or spreadsheet, alphabetizing saves oodles of time in the long run. You should be able to blast through entering alphabetized, stapled grades.

Eduhonesty: Kudos to Michael Stewart who gave me this tip during my first year teaching. If you have small classes or that industrial stapler costs too much, you can get by with a regular, cheaper model and multiple small packets, but I love my industrial stapler. Whatever stapler you use, keeping papers together will simplify your life. I also recommend a special dedicated bag for homework papers– the homework goes in the Elmo bag, for example — and another bag for other papers. The objective is to never lose a homework paper ever and, with the right system, you should be able to make that happen.

(More advice for newbies. This is for newbies who are getting assigned homework back. The amount of homework that comes back varies considerably from district to district. Please share this post with middle school and high school teachers especially.)

Did you spend the week-end surrounded by stacks of papers? Are student pages covered with your comments? Did you grade endlessly through the World Series? Or maybe even grade in the car while someone else drove? I remember those days.

Here are a few tips for strategically planning homework assignments:

♦ Before making the assignment, ask yourself: Do I want to grade problems 1 through 34? Do my students need to do all 34 problems? Consider assigning the odd or even numbers instead.

♦ Even if your students are assigned all 34 problems — you may believe they need the practice and hopefully that’s your call — consider grading only a subset of those problems. If you do this, I suggest breaking up classes into separate piles. In a class of thirty students, for example, make 5 piles or papers. For the first pile, grade problems one through seven, for the second pile grade problems eight through fifteen, etc. You want to grade all the problems so you can see where the class had difficulty, but you don’t want to grade every single problem. In an ideal universe, you might grade every problem, you and your three clones on the couch beside you, but in the real world 34 times 120 equals 4,080 problems to grade. If you do this nightly, you will eventually burn out. In fact, you may flame out before the year’s over.

If some piles have lower scores due to tougher problems, curve your results.

Language, studies and science students tend to have fewer problems but often more involved problems. Again, don’t grade them all. Look for samples to use. Your goal is to understand where your students need more help by the time you finish grading. You don’t need to look at the entire contents of every paper to figure that out.

♦ Learn to “scan” papers, glancing over them quickly to spot trouble. Grade a few papers completely and carefully. Then scan the rest, making a mark to indicate trouble as you go. Do it fast. Try to set a deadline if that works for you and does not stress you out. Tell yourself that all of 3rd period has to be done in one-half hour, for example.

♦ Don’t sweat the points too much. Who cares if Xavier got a 7 or an 8? In the end, small point differences will average out by the quarter’s end. Give Xavier the higher score and move on.

♦ Identify students who look at the homework and study your corrections. I recommend spending more time on those papers. If Jasmine studies your feedback, taking a few extra minutes on her paper makes sense.

♦ Identify students who are going to look at the final number and just toss the paper. I’d talk to those students to try to get them to take advantage of grading, but some kids only care about the number on top. Frankly, your helpful comments will be mostly wasted on them. Scan through those papers fast and move on.

♦ Ask students where they had trouble before you start grading. At the start of class or when you pick up papers, ask the class which homework problems were hardest. Those are the problems you will want to grade with more care. If the answers seem to be a hopeless mess, that’s where the review session begins.

♦ Don’t be too helpful. (What??!?) I know that may sound wrong, but I believe fewer comments often lead to more learning. If you put nine comments on a page, the most important ones may get lost. Too much feedback and kids tend to shut down or have difficulty sorting out what they need to learn. For single paragraph openers or exit slips, for example, I’d recommend no more than three comments or corrections. Let a few imperfections slide and focus on what most matters. I might look at a paragraph and write, “Remember to capitalize cities!” along with one or two other observations and then let other flaws pass for later. In my experience, one or two exclamation points will be noticed and remembered.

♦ If you know you can’t get through the grading that night, break up grading into small groups and do part of the grading. You want to know where students are struggling. You will also thank yourself come the week-end if you have half that day’s grading done rather than none. A small pile each day is enough to get a feel for how well your lesson went and for the material you may need to review before moving on.

♦ If you are falling behind regularly, consider grading homework in class. Let students grade the homework for you. This provides immediate reinforcement for right and wrong answers. Students benefit from seeing what went wrong the day after they wrote down their answers. If they get feedback three days later, they may not receive nearly as much benefit.

♦ Consider informal grading. Put a check mark. Put a check and a plus. Make one helpful comment. Don’t bother with the gradebook. Just let students know you looked at their work. Not everything needs to be recorded!

I hope this helps, readers. Have a great day!

Test preparation today sometimes steals from regular classes and long-established electives in the core curriculum. When I was teaching Spanish a couple of years ago, I was expected to steal 4+ minutes from each of my classes every day for “math minutes.” I passed out, timed and collected math minute worksheets daily. After a few weeks, I followed the lead of colleagues and did all the worksheets in one big 10-minute lump at the end of the week, saving paper-handling.

After a few weeks of picking up sheets obviously covered with wrong answers, I also sometimes dropped Spanish for long enough to explain how to do that day’s math before my students tackled their latest challenge. I ended up losing more than twenty minutes during those Friday classes, but that seemed preferable to passing out papers to be slaughtered by students who 1) did not know the math expected and 2) did not care.

A school secretary was tasked with keeping track of math minute compliance. In a school with more than 2,000 students, I can’t imagine how many total hours of work that represented. Every teacher had to do math minutes. Once each quarter, we also had to assign a five-paragraph argumentative English essay. The secretary called if papers were turned in late.

Five or six classes each giving essays adds up to a great deal of writing. Students whined, “I have to do this for art, math, chemistry and history, too!” Resentment was high. Substandard efforts were common. Some essays were hand-slopped together in disconnected prose, filled with non sequiturs and fascinating logical leaps. Should we allow illegal immigrants to settle here? No, I discovered, because they will use up all the food and water.

Well, that would be bad, that’s for sure, I thought. Fortunately, I did not have to grade the essays, although I was supposed to correct them, looking for problems in grammar and structure. Sometimes I hardly knew where to start. Thirsty folks, those immigrants.

Was the net effect of student palpable ill-will and lack of effort worth the results? Math practice and essay writing are beneficial to students, so administrators could easily justify extra practice time in these areas. What got forgotten or ignored in the process, though, was the opportunity cost, the material never taught in Spanish, history, music or ceramics, material taken away from classes that didn’t directly address future test needs, especially when so little productive effort was put into some of the actual math minutes and essays themselves.

In exchange for that opportunity cost, we probably did gain points in math testing. I am not sure we gained points in English. I read through too much massacred English that had been used to sculpt a stunning lack of critical thinking. The kids knew they had to do the essay. That poor secretary was checking. They also knew that their essay did not count toward in their Spanish grade.

Eduhonesty: Do you have math minutes, essays or their equivalent to do? This is my advice for you: Try to make those minutes count. If you have to drop what you are doing to teach math or English, do what you have to do. In the end, we only have our students for a short time. We don’t want to waste their time. I kept trying to get back to Spanish. If I had my minutes and essays to do over, I might have taught more math. I would have let the English go. I can teach English, but I doubt I could have convinced those students to care about their essays when they were simultaneously writing five of them for no grade.

But I let my students wing the math minutes too many times. Those minutes tested discrete topics that were teachable. If they had to do the work, they should have received the instruction necessary for success from the start. I could have managed that with my initial math minutes.

If you are a teacher who is caught up and always ready for the week, you can skip this post! If you are a new reader, I ask you to share this with colleagues who are just getting started with teaching or colleagues who are feeling swamped right now.

I know many readers are new or fairly new to teaching. By this point in the year, sometimes teachers have the glub glub glub sense that they are going under, as the time demands of their position take over their lives. Maybe your week-end just got sucked away from you.

Here are some tips to help:

♦ Read the lesson plan for tomorrow at the end of the school day before you leave the building. This allows for emergency trips to Walmart or the Dollar Store. It’s easiest to stop on the way home.

♦ Stock up on regularly used materials, especially if you find a sale. These materials will differ from subject to subject and grade to grade, but it’s a good bet you will need markers and/or colored pencils and glue sticks.

♦ When possible, try to grade as you go. You can often do this as you are helping with classwork. You can still buy those old green gradebooks from days of yore, or you can print out spreadsheet pages to attach to a clipboard. Put your students names in the first column and print the gridlines to make blank boxes. One advantage to this approach will be evident immediately. Many students work more diligently in class when they see that clipboard walking around.

♦ Don’t grade everything. You can put a check or a check with a plus on many items that don’t need to be in a gradebook and add praise where due. Students mostly want to know you looked at their work. (Don’t tell them work will be ungraded, though. The quality of some students’ work slips dramatically if they don’t expect that work to figure in their grade.)

♦ Consider not leaving school until all the grading is done and all materials are ready for the next day, if family and other demands don’t make this impossible. Staying to grade can make for a long day, but the advantage is huge. When you leave, you will often be completely done for the day. You will be able to watch Rizzoli and Isles in peace, without your laptop in front of you and papers strewn all over the floor in front of the TV.

♦ If you are not naturally good with time, set timers or your phone to alert you to the need to move on to the next item in your lesson plan. I’d suggest setting the alerts when you are reading your tomorrow’s lesson plan at the end of the day.

♦ Are your routines slipping? Don’t let them get away from you. Routines save time. You want those first few minutes of class clear to finish attendance and do set-up work. Make sure you have a functional opener and that kids know what to do without your help. By now, they should be entering class and starting to work on their own. If they are not, ask a colleague for advice on how to get this piece in place.

♦ Before the day begins, ask yourself: “What do my students need to learn?” Staying focused keeps time from slipping away.

♦ Take time to call parents. Whether for homework, behavioral or disciplinary issues, parents can help. Parent calls tend to get put on the back burner, but that’s a mistake. Five or ten minutes talking to mom may prevent hours of student issues throughout the year.

♦ Have some fun! Schedule dinner with a friend. Make Thursday family board game night. Join a book club. Establish a regular gym routine.  You will get more done faster when you are having some fun. You’ll be less of a grouch in class, too.