(This is another quick, down and dirty post for new teachers. If readers know anyone who is just getting started in the field, please pass on this URL. I am oversimplifying my topic a bit, but I would like to make the first few months of teaching easier for men and women tackling their first assignment.)

At some point while taking education classes, prospective teachers will confront pictures of various possible desk arrangements for a classroom. These future teachers will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various set-ups, a discussion that often suffers from a reality deficit, especially if there are no experienced public school teachers in the classroom. Many education professors have taught only briefly in public schools and sometimes then not for decades.

My next piece of advice is for any newbies in the field: Scrap any seating arrangement in which students regularly face each other. Clustering students in tight groups also should be avoided. Foursomes are not your friend.

I personally favor seating students in pairs. Students can be angled so everyone can see the teacher and audiovisual equipment at the front. Pairing provides convenient seat partners to work with. For group work, alternate pairs can turn their desks around to make foursomes. I have also had some success with “U” shapes in which the desks on the side face in and desks in back face towards the front. This shape tends to work well in smaller classes.

The truth is that old-fashioned rows work very well, but they are unfashionable. If you plan to look good to administrative visitors, you probably want to avoid rows. Small groups are all the rage right now, and rows may convey the impression that you are doing whole group instruction, rather than small groups. Since administrators only catch snippets of instruction and may not see many minutes of your actual work, creating the right first impression needs to be a priority for you.

Eduhonesty: When in doubt, ask a more experienced colleague for help in laying out classroom desks, but keep in mind that teaching becomes easier with time. After a few years, some teachers can work with groups of four, even if students are not automatically facing front. That takes experience and a strong hand, though.

For anyone new to the profession, I strongly recommend making life simple. Pairing students in rows should prove the most manageable set-up for starting out. You can always change a set-up that is not working, but I recommend not making too many changes too often. Continuity helps a classroom gain its footing.

The Internet is filled with sample seating charts, of course. Some provide help for addressing specific behaviors. One last piece of advice: If you are not sure you have the right chart, go back to the drawing board. You will want to live with your chart for weeks or preferably months. Putting careful thought into desk placement upfront prevents hours of aggravation and numerous phone calls home later.

I have posted this advice before. Please go look at my June 6th post for details. My best and favorite classroom management tool has been the sets of CDs that I burned for my classrooms.

This bribe for good behavior always worked well for me.

As noted in my June 6th post, teachers will need to check the lyrics of songs their students choose. The odds that all those song lyrics will be appropriate for the classroom are probably only slightly greater than the odds that Santa Claus is a Martian.

I reread my last post and think I sound rather fierce. I will nonetheless stand by that post. The first week in a classroom sets the tone for the whole year. One big riddle of education, wrapped in a mystery, trapped inside an enigma, must be the number of teachers who walk away within the first five years of entering the profession. Studies indicate that 40 to 50% will abandon teaching within those five years.

That’s the current wisdom anyway. I believe the study’s a few years old. I would not be surprised to discover that the percentage has risen above 50%.

Undoubtedly, some new teachers are pushed out, but many flee the scene despite formidable student loan debt. Support and mentoring programs can help keep teachers in the system. For the next few weeks, I intend to focus on mentoring, rather than the many things within the system that are breaking or broken.

Somehow this blog of gloom and doom has acquired over 8,000 registered users. I suspect many or most of you are experienced educators. If you know a newbie, though, please feel free to pass on this URL.

I started with classroom management yesterday because everything starts with classroom management. Brilliantly written lesson plans might as well be toilet paper in the absence of effective classroom management.

Eduhonesty: Incidentally, I have a real gripe with current education classes. So many new teachers tell me they were taught how to design lessons and lesson plans, but not taught more than rudimentary fundamentals of classroom management. When education schools emphasize making lessons, instead of managing students, they do their own students a grave disservice. For one thing, in many schools nowadays, teachers are all teaching the same preprepared lesson plan anyway.

(This post is essentially for teachers of middle and high school students, but the general concept applies to elementary school as well, with the caveat that behavior modification efforts for elementary school require more finesse and thought.)

For starting teachers out there, I offer this advice for the first few weeks:

Take no prisoners. Offer no amnesty. Commute no sentences. Come in hard and fast even as you offer up the possibility of fun times later. These first few weeks will set up the rest of your year. If you allow disrespect, you will battle disrespect all year. If you sanction laziness and half-hearted efforts, you will see papers sloppy enough to make you doubt the future of the human race.

Enter your room with high expectations. In college, professors teach all sorts of cajoling, encouraging ways to get students on the right track. Up to a point, those professors are helping you with that advice. But a classroom is not a democracy. Encouragement only goes so far.

Take charge. It’s fine to let the class help you come up with the class rules, as long as you keep ultimate veto power. Some teachers start with just one rule: Respect. They brainstorm what respect looks like with their students, and discuss how to achieve a respectful classroom. Other teachers use canned rules provided by their school or rules they have cobbled together over time.

However you approach rules, though, you must set up a clear discipline plan, with both rewards and consequences. Post the plan. Explain the plan to your kids on the first day and review that plan throughout the first week. Send the plan home for parents to read and sign. If those signatures don’t come back, call home. If possible, all parent copies should be placed in a folder for easy access so this sheet can be a reference at parent-teacher conferences when needed.

If this post sounds a little fierce, I apologize. I always had fun with my classes. But I learned from experience that whenever I relaxed my rules too much, my students and I paid the price. Some flexing is inevitable. Sorting between real bathroom emergencies and desired cell phone breaks is learned on the job, and there’s an art to sorting out where the rules should bend and where not. When in doubt, I recommend not flexing. For the bathroom requests, tell students to ask you again in 5 (10) minutes. In a real emergency, they will remember. I have found many students forget or the urge passes.

Why this fierce tone in a post by a teacher who is an admitted Fluffy Bunny of an educator? These first few weeks can truly make or break you. The routine of the class is being established and that routine will prove critical as the year progresses. Five minutes lost here, five minutes lost there and pretty soon hours of instructional time will disappear each week. Some kids always try to take advantage of the rules. They are trying to learn the limits and every time a teacher relaxes those limits, the limits move further afield and further outside that teacher’s control.

Do yourself a favor. If you see the rules being broken deliberately or carelessly, issue detentions in that first week or two, if school policies and student circumstances permit. Give lunch detentions, even if that means missing your own lunch to supervise. In my experience, the most effective penalties for misbehavior involve loss of students’ personal time. Don’t let any misbehavior float past you. Unusually problematic behavior should result in a call home. Don’t be afraid to be strict. That strictness serves the greater good, and once the routines are cemented in place, you will be able to relax.

In the big picture, you want to teach as much as you can as fast as you can. Classroom routines allow teachers to teach without interruption.

Eduhonesty: YOUR classroom, your rules. Don’t let anyone convince you that classrooms should follow democratic principles. Don’t feel a need to justify the class rules to students. Many adolescents would vote themselves all day lunch, gym and recess if they could, maybe with an occasional art class to spice up the day.

Oops! I’m not sure how these got here. I seem to have three reading passages from the AIMSWEB test, neatly ensconced in plastic sleeves. This benchmark test involves one-on-one reading to a teacher/listener who tracks time and fluency. Students read the same three passages three separate times throughout the year. Progress is recorded. In my case, I put results into a spreadsheet so that coaches and administrators could assess individual reading improvement. Most teachers in my building were tasked with entering this data into spreadsheets. Yes, I taught math and science, but all core teachers had to administer these tests. We spent hour after hour giving these tests, losing instructional time as we did so.

I am not writing an “oh-the-time-loss!” post, though. I am writing an “oh-the-potential-for-cheating!” post. I did not cheat. I don’t even know how these neat, sleeved papers about Josh, the mountain and a tiny town in Pennsylvania got here. I do know that a less-scrupulous instructor could certainly have used these sheets to prepare for this particular benchmark test. (Incidentally, we all had these sheets for some time. We could easily have snapped pictures of them with our phones.)

How would I have cheated if I had done so? I would have taken all the problematic vocabulary specific to my three tests and made sure to teach that vocabulary to the exclusion of other content. I might have rewritten the tests, with minor adaptations to make my rewrite less obvious, and specifically taught those tests, maybe sending them home as extra-credit homework shortly before the actual test. I am sure some teachers would have simply taught the actual test. It’s been done before by desperate educators.

I am about to recycle these sheets, but I knew I had a blog post in my hands when I stumbled on these Pearson materials while cleaning out my cupboard. Somehow, I managed to leave school with those papers, probably in a pile of homework, maybe in the pile of AIMSWEB test results that I had to put into the spreadsheet. I likely did not bother to return the passages because I was done testing or, worse, forgot and borrowed someone else’s passages. Maybe I copied the relevant sheets from a neighbor. My memory of these testing events is blissfully fading and I have no idea what happened.

Why would I choose to cheat? Absent moral considerations, teachers’ evaluations and reputations are being partially determined by benchmark and standardized test score improvements. Retention may even be affected by incremental increases or decreases in these numbers. The incentive to do whatever it takes to push the numbers up keeps rising. A google search on “school district cheating” returned about 5,010,000 results (0.29 seconds), leading with a CNN story on the jail sentences meted out to Atlanta educators for cheating on their state standardized test.

I am not sure how to end this post. Should I call for more supervision of test materials? Or less connection between test results and employment potential — especially for new or nearly new teachers? Should I seek recognition of the challenges posed by different subgroups in the population? It’s worth noting here that the original plan for No Child Left Behind had all special education students up to academic grade level by 2014, regardless of the nature of their disabilities — including even traumatic brain injuries and profound cognitive delays from other sources. The fact is that students in different classrooms can vary greatly in their ability to march up the academic ladder, a fact educational administrators and government leaders often ignore.

The testing monster has been running amok for some time. As its power grows, we test the moral fiber of teachers and administrators. Maybe we need to take a step back and realize that the benefits from all this testing are not coming close to covering the costs.

It’s summer. My daughter and I went shopping today and ran errands. I have probably used my hand sanitizer 5 times. After shoe shopping, those tiny bottles are mandatory. Before touching the pizza, I take another hit, erasing the purses I picked up. Some of my students are learning to rely on sanitizer. Especially when three or four students are obviously sick, I remind everybody to use the big bottle in the front of the room.

I can bolt down meals so fast that not even the fumes are left.

I love school supplies and warm laminating machines.

Here’s to margaritas (or cookies) when the moon is full.

Snapchat is a mobile-only social network that allows people to send automagically deleting photos and messages. Like other apps of its kind, this site has become especially popular with teenagers who do not always understand that any image that pops up on a phone can be saved or retrieved. All they see is the pesky trail of evidence evanescing, leaving only a memory of a text or photo — unless that photo has been deliberately saved as a screenshot. Sexting becomes simpler. Gang-related and other illegal communications become safer and more comfortable.

Snapchat obviously has many legitimate uses, such as sending pictures of goofy selfies and delicious tacos. The fact that the site can be misused does not detract from its many other fun uses. Still, I am going to pass on a URL from Forbes for parents or teachers who have not paid attention to those automagical deletions that many teenagers favor: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2013/05/01/what-is-snapchat-and-why-do-kids-love-it-and-parents-fear-it/

Eduhonesty: Personally, I am always nervous about content my children and students don’t want me to see.

According to http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites, the fifteen most popular social networking sites are currently Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Plus +, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Vine, Meetup, Tagged, Ask.fm, MeetMe, and ClassMates. Any list of this nature should include YouTube even if YouTube only peripherally relates to social media. My middle school students use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Vine especially, visiting YouTube often. Snapchat, Burn Note, Whisper and Yik Yak also appeal to teens because we have successfully convinced students that they need privacy online. As a result, in the past few years, apps that use secret, self-destructing pictures/messages have been taking off. SnapChat, BurnNote, Whisper, Firechat, Secret, and others offer self-destructing messaging. Once the picture/message is read on the recipient’s Smartphone, that picture/message self-destructs, leaving no trace, unless saved as a screenshot.

I flash back to Mission Impossible.

“Good morning, Distracted Student. Your mission, Student, should you choose to accept it, is to keep your phone hidden from the teacher at all times, while attempting to take frequent bathroom breaks to ensure you will have no idea what happened in class that day. As always should any member of your Smartphone force be caught and suspended or expelled, your friends will disavow all knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck Student.”

I am posting this tidbit about social networking sites because many older adults and even younger parents remain only hazily aware of the breadth of social networking options out there, especially given the power of Smartphones. For one thing, some of us are busy working. I am active on Facebook, but I rarely visit my Twitter, Flickr, Pinterest and LinkedIn accounts. Blogging tends to suck up my screen time.

Eduhonesty: Smartphones often seem like more of a nuisance than a real problem, dogfish rather than sharks in the waters of K-12 education. Because I am a bit of a fuzzy bunny (O.K., I fractured my metaphor, I admit) of a teacher, readily approachable and often willing to take a minute to explore my students’ daily lives, I have seen various messages and videos on sites listed above, sometimes starring my students. I’m not objecting to these messages and videos.

However, I feel compelled to observe that these “phones” often … aren’t. My somewhat aged phone served as a phone for less than a quarter of my vacation, probably much less. I blogged on that phone. I dictated notes and thoughts. I created visuals. For months, I left my laptop home, having jettisoned the extra weight, reasoning that my phone served as a perfectly functional computer.

A piece of advice for parents and teachers: Try renaming those phones. Try calling them computers. Suddenly, the sharklike nature of the small, shiny, electronic boxes seems much more apparent. I have trouble not being distracted by my phone. As an adolescent, I do not believe I could have focused on academics if I had access to a Smartphone — not with the whole internet waiting for me.

For proof that the current system is effectively broken, I offer the following from U.S. News and World Report, CAROLYN THOMPSON, Associated Press, Aug. 12, 2015 | 5:04 p.m. EDT:

About 20 percent of New York students refused to take spring assessment tests, officials say
BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — About 20 percent of New York’s third- through eighth-graders refused to take the statewide English and math tests given in the spring, the state’s education chief said, acknowledging the opt-outs affected assessment data released Wednesday, which otherwise showed a slight uptick in overall student achievement.

About 900,000 students sat for the Common Core-aligned tests in April, while 200,000 opted out as part of a protest movement against what’s seen in New York and other states as an overreliance on testing in measuring student and teacher performance.

About 5 percent of students opted out of last year’s tests.

The rest of this article can be found at http://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2015/08/12/about-20-percent-of-ny-students-refused-to-take-spring-tests.

Incidentally, when one in five students refuse to take a test, that “acknowledgement” by the state’s education chief that assessement data was “affected” is disingenuous, especially when followed by any assertion that student achievement shows improvement. With that many missing numbers in the equation, it’s entirely possible that state student achievement went down, not up. New York school officials are hiding the truth when they say anything else.