Note: This was originally written for teachers, but right now I think it’s a good recommendation for anyone who is frantic, trying to get it all done, especially parents managing online schooling.

It’s September 2020 as I write this. This post is from 2019 and takes us back to better times. I won’t edit the old post, just make the observation that if you can’t go out for chicken wings with coworkers, zoom for fun and not just lesson preparation. Make a plan to eat pizza while zooming. Maybe you could zoom while all polishing your own toenails :-).

The start of the school year can be nuts. Many teachers cut sleep to get rooms ready, lessons prepared, and required administrative paperwork done. I asked a young teacher how she was doing this week and she responded by speechlessly breaking into tears. She had been cutting sleep for days. By the end of her week she was about two days short of sleep.

Don’t do this!! You will probably get sick. For one thing, sick kids frequently come to school at the start of the year — even with the flu. I read a post yesterday from a colleague who had managed to be her doctor’s first flu case of the year for two years running.

You may also lose your sense of humor, an almost essential component to creating a good relationship with your students, not to mention getting along with administration and other humans. At worst, you will end up blasting some admin for making yet another marginally-useful-at-best paperwork demand. A few missing hours here, a few missing hours there, and your patience may evaporate, leading you to tell the assistant principal exactly what you think of the new spreadsheet, due by Friday, documenting all student reading progress over the last six years.

Eat. Drink — flavored, fizzy waters, Gatorade, plain old water, and other alternatives that are not coffee. I love coffee, but humans are not meant to live on coffee alone.  Visit with colleagues. Go out for chicken wings or pizza with fellow teachers. If your school has no regular Lou Malnati’s Pizza Friday get-together, make it happen. Sleep enough so that you can enjoy your day, and your pizza. When the kids say something funny, you want to laugh. You are building relationships. I have had a few days when I had to turn off the lights and ask for mercy due to migraines. I always got my mercy because students knew I valued them. No small part of that is laughing at their jokes and turning up at their soccer games.

Set a bedtime if you must, and try your hardest to stick to that bedtime. I recommend scheduling massages, and yoga or martial arts classes as well. If there’s an exercise or yoga class on your way home from work, I suggest plunking down the money to schedule that regular break between work and home. Routines help. So does a reason not to linger in your classroom after school.

On week-ends, get a pedicure. Take the dog for a long walk in the forest preserve. Go golfing or play tennis. Meet friends to watch the football game. Stream the latest John Wick movie. Whatever works, whatever you can manage that refreshes you.

Be kind to yourself.

Part of the tips for newbies series:

Lunch detentions work especially well for classroom management. Yes, giving up a peaceful lunch is tough. But you may find those quieter minutes with a few students in your classroom to be some of the best minutes of the year. Students talk at lunch. They share.

Overt defiance, disrespect and insubordination allow you to write immediate referrals to administration, rescuing classroom instructional minutes. Those referrals should not reflect badly on your management. If Ozzie refused to do his classwork, told you he did not have to listen to you, and then ripped up his paper, no one will think badly of you for referring Ozzie. A student who acts that far off the chain almost always has racked up a long paperwork trail behind him. The administration already knows Ozzie. If not, his last school most likely warned them he was coming.

Still, I might not write that referral immediately in August or September or even October. Ideally, I want to convince Ozzie to join my class. I’d rather start by giving him a detention with me. If lunch detention does not work because of scheduling conflicts, I might set up detention in the library after school instead.*

I want to talk with Ozzie, to try to find out why he ripped up his paper. Lots of Ozzies are acting out because they have fallen so far behind that they prefer to get in trouble rather than be embarrassed. I would probably call home on that shredded assignment, but I might also let that first incident pass without calling, letting Ozzie know that I chose to give him a second chance rather than calling parents/guardians+ immediately. I might do the paper with him. Sometimes, when you give Ozzie a second chance along with the tutoring he needs to understand the assignment he ripped up, Ozzie will give you a second chance.

Those defiant, insubordinate students are often leaders within their peer groups. If a teacher can convince them to buy into the program, they bring other students in with them. You may not be able to pull an Ozzie in, but when you can, the results are worth the struggle. These students can be top-notch first officers as you captain your classroom, helping to keep routines and disciplinary procedures running smoothly. The truth is, I love my Ozzies and I think they sense that. Rebels appeal to me. This country and most of the world was built by rebels.

Eduhonesty: Sometimes that torn paper is a secret test by a kid. Early insubordination can be used to find out what sort of a person you are. There’s a dilemma here: You have to keep control of your classroom, and that means not letting rude remarks and defiance go unremarked and unchallenged. You must react. But rude behavior can also be an opportunity, a reason to issue Ozzie a detention. Detentions offer you an opening, a chance to spend small group or individual time with students who are sometimes just begging to be understood.

You might lay in snacks for detention days. Those little bags of chips don’t cost too much, especially if you belong to Costco or Sam’s Club, and they provide a natural start for conversation. “Which chip is your favorite?” gives a student a chance to start talking about himself or herself on a topic that’s not too personal.

Have a great year!

*It’s better not to be alone with students after school, troubled students in particular, so I recommend libraries or other public places. I also recommend keeping the door to your classroom open during detentions.

(A post mostly for newbies, among others.)

Let me recommend a website designed to spotlight the topic of attendance: http://awareness.attendanceworks.org. This battle needs to be fought, and with the many details involved in starting the year, a few repeat absences can slip by teachers. In severely overcrowded classrooms, those absences may even seem welcome. My first year of teaching, I started with forty students in my Spanish 1 classes, and I will frankly confess that when the count fell into the low thirties I often felt relieved.

But that’s another problem — overcrowding — and another post.

Attendance problems frequently develop into a downward spiral. Studies show children with erratic attendance get lower grades and less positive reinforcement for the academic efforts they do make. Children with lower grades and less positive reinforcement become more likely to avoid school in the future when the opportunity arises. Attendance has become one of the invisible elephants hiding in the room with us, too often given only lip service when reformers push for rising test scores in traditionally academically-challenged districts.

I’d like to start with why the month September itself matters. When I did a google search on this topic, I came up with “Absences Add Up: How School Attendance Influences Student Success” By Alan Ginsburg, Phyllis Jordan and Hedy Chang, August 2014, an article on the some of the affects of absenteeism.

From the Ginsberg, Jordan and Chang article:

APPENDIX II:

A. Why September Matters: Improving Student Attendance
… poor attendance early in the school year can predict chronic absence. In Why September Matters: Improving Student Attendance, Linda S. Olson studies attendance in the Baltimore City Public Schools for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade students in September and throughout the rest of the 2012-13 school year. She focused on students who missed 20 days of school in excused or unexcused absences…

 

The study found:
• Students who missed fewer than 2 days in September typically had good attendance rates for the entire year.
• Half the students who missed 2-4 days in September went on to miss a month or more of school, which is known as chronic absence. This group missed an average of 25 days.
• Nearly 9 out of 10 students who missed more than 4 days in September were chronically absent that year. These students missed an average of 70 days.

Let’s pause to focus on that last number: 70 days. Seventy days??!? That’s approaching half the school year. Maybe Stephen Hawking could have continued his academic progress with that little help from the educational system, but almost nobody else will be ready for the next year’s curriculum after a nuclear educational blow of that magnitude.

 

B. Chronic Absence and Its Effects on Students’ Academic and Socioemotional Outcomes:
… August 2014 in the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk … researcher Michael A. Gottfried at the University of California Santa Barbara used a U.S. Department of Education data base that tracks 10,740 students. That data base, known as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, includes results for kindergarten tests measuring reading and math ability, as well as six social and emotional skills. … Gottfried divided the absentee students into two levels — those missing 11 to 19 days (what he calls “moderate”) and those missing 20 or more days (which he calls “strong”).
Gottfried’s findings include:
• About 13 percent of the students were chronically absent — 10 percent of them at the moderate level and 3 percent at the strong level.
• Chronically absent students at both levels performed below their better-attending peers on math and reading skills assessments. The differences were wider in math than reading, and more significant for those missing a month or more than for those at the moderate level.
• Chronic absence is associated with a lack of certain social skills, including a child’s ability to pay attention, work independently, adapt to change and persist in tasks. It also reflects a lack of eagerness to learn new things and a lack of engagement in school. Again, the differences are greater for the students who miss more school. Poor attendance did not correlate with a child’s ability to control emotions or make friends.

It’s tough to know where to go with these results. From Absences Add Up | Attendance Works, we learn the following:

• Those with worse attendance showed decreases in their engagement in school and eagerness to learn by the spring testing.
• Family circumstances mattered for chronic absence. Students from low-income families whose parents were not married were more likely to be chronically absent.
• Parent involvement mattered for chronic absence. Students with lower absences had parents who were more likely to take them to book stores, music lessons or tutoring, among other activities.

While I don’t normally venture into preschool and early childhood waters — I don’t know much about early childhood education since I always taught in middle and high schools — I left the last section of that block quote because the bullet points emphasize the importance of family involvement in attendance. Preschool attendees fare better in the absenteeism picture, but that strikes me as natural. Parents who go out of their way to get early education for their kids can be expected to value education more highly than parents who don’t seek out that education.

Most of the above references to data about absenteeism are intuitive. You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the test-scores blow with chronically absent students. Chronically absent students hardly ever succeed academically.

The question that faces teachers is this: Can I influence attendance enough to help at least some of my students? I am writing this post because my experience suggests that, yes, you can. Call home. Call home again. If your districts allows or encourages the practice, go to that home. You have to tackle that “one more day won’t matter” mantra. Some parents respond to their sense that the teacher cares, that the teacher will be disappointed in them if little Audrey does not make it to the bus. This issue should be a September priority, too, before bad habits set in.

Admittedly, absenteeism can sometimes prove impossible to manage. I have referred a number of students without success to truancy programs designed to manage the chronically absent. Sadly, if mom insists on keeping Hedy home to babysit her little sisters and brother when she cannot find a sitter, authorities may talk and talk to mom, but that talking may not get Hedy to school on babysitting days. If dad cannot drive Slater to school after he misses the bus and dad cannot get himself up in time to get Slater ready for the bus, Slater will miss school. You cannot fix all the dysfunctional family dynamics out in the world.

Still, I believe engaging parents in understanding the long-term effects of absenteeism can help. Helping will require preparing a speech. The above URL could be a good place to start. The internet is overflowing with helpful data about long-term effects from chronic absences — even if specifics can be extremely difficult to nail down.*

I approach absenteeism like I approach the latte effect, which I first heard explained by Ben Stein. One latte may only be $4.00, an inexpensive indulgence. Why not? The “why not” comes later. If I buy that latte every day, by year’s end I will have spent $1,460 on my coffee. In the same vein, a day here, a day there, and by the end of the school year a student may have missed more than 5 weeks of a 36 week school year. Few students can recover academically from that loss of time, even if the loss occurred in dribs and drabs. I then talk about math specifically because it’s easy for parents to see how missing math can make every future school year more miserable.

Eduhonesty: What can you do? Parent education has the potential to rescue a Hedy or Slater. Teach the attendance version of the latte effect to parents. Share the results from studies showing long-term academic damage from regular absences. Share tips that will help control the problem, such as scheduling doctor and dentist appointments after school or first thing in the morning. Emphasize that family vacations should not overlap the school year. Help parents figure out alternative transportation for when students miss busses. Can an aunt or uncle help? Make it gently clear that bad weather hardly ever justifies missing school. You might have parents send a change of clothes for students who are wet or cold. Heck, if all else fails, go to a resale shop and buy a few coats for needy students. If you explain your purpose, sometimes you can get phenomenal deals.

Parents respond to teacher concern. If they are shown the data that connects absenteeism to poor performance, some parents will shift that doctor appointment from 11:30 AM to 8 AM to minimize class hours lost. Some parents will decide to postpone the family visit to Puerto Rico until the start of school vacations.

This post falls into the category of “More work at the start of the year and I am already buried now!” As with other advice in this blog, many teachers can skip making these attendance calls. If you work in a school with excellent attendance, you may have nearly perfect attendance all year. But regardless of a school’s attendance patterns, I’d call on any student who missed three days in September and any who miss two without an obviously good reason, starting by expressing concern for the absent student. When you call, you may want to bundle up other useful information into the call. This is a perfect time for reminders about Open House or parent conferences. Those reminders help prevent parents from going on the defensive.

For those of you working in schools that suffer from chronic absenteeism, I’d suggest looking at last year’s absenteeism (if you can lay hands on that data) and calling the parents of all potential problem students. I’d call home at the first absence for any new students. I’d also present a version of my “absenteeism leads to poor academic performance” at conferences, with the understanding that the parents you most need to reach are ironically the most likely to miss conferences.

While teachers cannot control attendance, we can definitely make improvements in a classroom’s overall absenteeism rate. I put up shiny stars on my data board, tracking student attendance for the class. I wrote down student names on the left of a laminated poster and then gave a star for every week of good attendance. At the end of the month, students received awards for having no unexcused absences. Showing students you care can make a difference, day by day.

P. S. I know an almost surefire way to identify struggling Title 1 schools. Look for those attendance charts with the stars on them. In wealthier, academically successful schools, those attendance charts are not found on the walls.

*Historical note: I once spent some time looking up high school data in the Illinois state interactive report card. I went to annual yearly progress (AYP) data for 2013 to check attendance success, since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) tracked attendance. As far as I could tell, all high schools in Illinois had an attendance rate of 92% and a graduation rate of 85%. The state’s attendance data seemed genuinely wacky. I’d love to know that story, but that too is another post.

(Click on the pic to get the full effect of this alphabet soup.)

We are steeped in a stew of initials, living in a time of ultimate contractions. Where did the term “POTUS” come from? Maybe we are seeing a collective reaction to the bewildering quantity of information coming at us. Maybe it’s a simple sense that “LOL” saves time, and “LMAO” gets the point across without any need for superfluous adjectives. IDK where this sea of letters originated. I do know that the letters serve sometimes to help people find their tribe. VCDA and VSF (“Vaya con Dios, Amigo” and “Very Sad Face”) are going fly right past many of us while granting inclusivity to those exchanging these letters.

The habit of shortening concepts to sets of capital letters has been invading business and education as well. This post is to ask writers to please, please write out the full phrase before resorting to the acronym. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of a shared language, but problems arise when nonspeakers enter the picture. Problems arise even if nonspeakers don’t enter the picture. Some people have natural facility with acronyms, but others don’t easily think in abbreviations. Those abbreviations can slow the very communication they are intended to accelerate. While ADHD is pretty safe, CDB and CDS are not. ACT, AYP and AP will be immediately understood by many, but SAFE and UBD not so much so.

Eduhonesty: Being a bit petty here, but I am tired of having to refer back to earlier paragraphs to figure out what I am reading. And I pick up acronyms easily. Some professional communications I have seen recently simply have too many capital letters sitting side-by-side. I believe any parent should be able to read our communiques about their children’s educations without referring to the internet as a reference source; when we create cheat sheets like the one above, we should pause to wonder why that cheat sheet seems necessary. As they say (or don’t say since I am making this up) — WRCEA: We are confused enough already.

(Readers, I suggest clicking on the photo so you can fully appreciate the fine details.)

Cleaning out my little black bag, I stopped. My train ticket was colorful. My train ticket had a useful message and drew my eye. The cracks in the window especially caught my attention. My ticket would make a fine cover for a zombie novel.

“Look, listen, live.” The threat of death seems to be everywhere: Category 5 storms, news reports of increasingly random shootings, coverage of car crashes, fires, floods, overdoses, domestic violence, flesh-eating bacteria, sharks, and now even week-end train rides. I think of my students, the many middle-school students who passed through my doors. How many of them can evaluate the odds of a shark attack?

Our scheduled and unscheduled active shooter drills seem necessary. We have to have a strategy, an escape plan. The threat is real. I tried to sequester my kids in out-of-sight areas of the gym once because security knew a kid with a gun was on his way. Eventually, I got through to them that THIS ONE was not a drill. Caring adults talked that kid down from the ledge and nothing happened. Nothing was reported to the news to my knowledge either. How many “almosts” never hit the news? I personally know another one, a gun that made it into a highly respected high school. A teacher talked that kid into giving up the gun.

The barrage of frightening information goes on and on and on. I am an adult and I can sort the information, so I am not worried about the train, the shark, or most of the other possibilities in my list. I cheerfully get into my car and carry my backpack onto many planes. But I remember being thirteen. Thirteen’s a twixt age, and children prone to anxiety can get lost in fear. Our students are beginning to make escape plans when they visit county fairs. They evaluate each classroom — sensibly, I’m afraid — to figure out how to escape a shooter. They ask how to identify a flesh-eating bacteria. What about this spot? Do I need to see a doctor?

Today’s post has been percolating for awhile. I haven’t known how to write it because the world may need scared kids today. We can’t keep telling them, “It’s O.K.!” when it’s not O.K. Those adolescents going out to do war with climate change, suicide and bullying? Their passion may be our last, best hope.

Eduhonesty: Still, the open information spigot should not be allowed to run full-force and non-stop. My classroom recommendation is to mostly leave the gloom, doom and darkness to internet and television commentators. Twist the handle of the faucet, allowing for trickles of storm and other news, but remember the kids probably don’t require much help to see what a mess the news is showing on any given day. By phone, television, tablet or laptop, U.S. children have become steeped in menacing messages. Kids are getting hammered by harsh truths. Even a train ride into the city for a festival, beach day or air show carries with it the anti-selfie message threat of the shattered train window.

I don’t intend to add extra blows to that barrage. Instead, I will be looking for better news to offer balance to the overall picture. The neighbors who banded together to help the newly arrived Eritrean family get started? Similar stories can be a place to start. For a quick good-news cheat, why not google “happy news”?