Like many teachers, for the past week I have been thinking about the Rhode Island high school that fired all of its teachers because the school repeatedly failed to reach NCLB standards. I don’t know much about the school, but I suspect I can guess what kind of school it is. I suspect it’s in a lower socio-economic level neighborhood and probably has a high transient rate for students and probably teachers and administrators also. I guess that few of the parents attended college, and I would imagine that some of the students who graduate from the school will be the first in their family to do so. Isn’t this the scenario of most schools that fail to meet NCLB?

Regardless of the students’ background, however, most Americans expect students in  schools like this to score as high on standardized tests as students in suburban, upper middle-class areas. How absurd!  Yes, students in impoverished areas can indeed meet the same standards as suburban kids, but it would require an extraordinary faculty and student body.

As I read about the firing of the Rhode Island teachers, I thought of my own high school in suburban Atlanta. We have a beautiful campus, and the facilities are only ten years old. Students have access to about 30 AP courses and scores and scores of extra-curricular activities and sports. The faculty is well trained and usually enthusiastic. Students perform well about the national average on standardized tests, and among the 2500 students, the only students we have to worry about are several hundred students who are not as economically advantaged as most of our students, the very type of student who probably makes up the majority of studens in the Rhode Island high school.

People who visit our school always compliment us on our facilities, the energy, compassion, and academic performance of our students, and the diligence, enthusiasm, and devotion of our teachers.

We are a wonderful school!

I wonder, however, what would happen if the couple of hundred of students who struggle academically were the majority of the student body instead of the minority?

What would people then say about our school?

Would someone step in to fire all of our teachers?

Would Arne Duncan, the United States Education Secretary, step in to applaud the firing of the entire faculty?

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Like most states, in this bad economy, Georgia is struggling to pay for schools and teachers. Teachers were furloughed for three days in the fall, and we will probably have 3 more furlough days this semester. Next year looks just as bad, and some politicians advocate shortening the school year by as many as ten days.

Yesterday as I watched the local television news, a state legislator disclosed his idea for funding the schools. With obvious rancor, he suggested that teachers who are making $100,000 should be forced to retire so systems could replace them with $40,000 teachers.

Such thinking is indicative of what often hinders schools: shortsighted thinking.

Yes, forcing “expensive” teachers into retirement will save school systems money, but what about learning? Will it help students to force our most experienced teachers into retirement and replace them with brand new teachers? While it is indeed true that some outstanding first-year teachers are exemplary and more effective than many teachers with years and years of experience, those situations are rare. While the research is unclear as to when teaching experience levels off, the research is absolutely clear that teachers are more effective each additional year they teach for at least the first five years for elementary teachers, and high school teachers on average continue to improve for several more years. Schools need experienced teachers.

Now, perhaps the economy has reached such dire straits that we need to take bold moves as the senator suggested, but couldn’t he display a little more respect and ASK teachers who have met retirement criteria to retire instead of sneering about expensive teachers?

Yes, I am, indeed, one of the old expensive teachers. With 32 years of teaching and a doctorate, I am at the top of Georgia teachers’ salary schedule.

Where are these $100,000 Georgia teachers?

I don’t know a $100,000 Georgia teacher!

Trading in old $100,000 teachers for $40,000 teachers isn’t going to work if there are no $100,000 Georgia teachers!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

For the past couple of days, I have been working on a faculty newsletter tribute to Ed Deavers, an outstanding teacher who died a little over a week ago. As I wrote previously, one of Ed’s former students established a Facebook page for Ed and invited students and former students to share their stories about Ed so they could grieve together.

As I copied many of these messages so I could add them to the tribute, I found one of Ed’s aphorisms particularly poignant. When students were working on plays together and worried about their own performances, Ed told them, “You’re safe; you’re warm; your with friends.” According to another student, Ed sometimes interchanged “family” for “friends.”

If we want students to learn, they must be willing to take chances, and they must learn to work together productively without fighting with each other or establishing factions. A supportive classroom environment is crucial.

What better way to welcome kids into a classroom and teach them to take care  of each other than repeatedly teaching them and saying to them, “You’re safe; you’re warm; you’re with friends.”

I wish every student could sit inside a classroom that emphasized this belief!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

I thought I had been really proactive. I had a flu shot in the fall and followed it with an H1N1 shot as soon as they were available to the general public. For the past couple of weeks, however, I have had many students who had colds, strep throat, or the flu. Now I’m sick.

I went to work today, but I was miserable. Before leaving I created lesson plans and sent messages to students to tell them what they will do tomorrow and how we will have to rearrange the syllabus since I will be absent tomorrow.

I spent about an hour creating lesson plans and will probably have to spend another hour cleaning up loose ends when I return to school on Wednesday.

I hate to be absent!  It requires more work, and I always feel guilty.

Does anyone else feel guilty when you miss school? I’ve never understood why I feel this way. Teachers are human. We get sick, and we stay home.

Most of the time, we also find that the kids are just fine without us. (Maybe that’s why I don’t want to be absent!)

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Earlier in the week our principal sent out an email to the faculty to apprise us that next year we will have a new football coach. The email contained a paragraph biography of the new coach, including where he attended college, degrees he holds, and where he currently coaches.

Today, our principal sent an email to parents to tell them about the new coach.

We have roughly 200 teachers, many of whom are highly accomplished, effective, and inspiring. No one has ever sent an email to the faculty or to the community to inform of a new physics teacher, or English teacher, or math teacher.

In the past two years, two outstanding, inspirational, and effective teachers retired, but no one sent an email to the faculty or to the community to celebrate the careers of these wonderful teachers or to state how much we will miss them.

In fact, in my 32 years of teaching, I don’t think I have ever known of a time when a school sent out emails or letters to inform about new important teachers or to say goodbye to retiring teachers.

We have a new football coach.

When a high school’s football record is 1-9, this apparently is a top priority.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

I recently heard a teacher proclaim that teachers are more isolated today than ever before. Since I had missed the first part of the conversation, I didn’t say anything about the comment, but I have been thinking about this concept ever since.

Are teachers more isolated today than in previous years?

The teacher who asserted this comment blamed the isolation on required tests, preparation for tests, standardized curricula, and NCLB.  I obviously missed something.

Years ago it was possible for a teacher to walk inside a school and spend practically no time conversing with adults during the day, probably the same amount of contact that we have with adults today. I used to feel  isolated, but I don’t feel that way today.   What has changed?

When I first started teaching, if I could not find a mentor or another teacher to help me when problems crept up during the day, I felt so alone. Today, if I don’t have someone in my department or among my circle of teacher friends who can help me, I reach out to other teachers through the Internet, and there is always someone out there.

Through websites, blogs, Nings, and other discussion forums, I can very quickly find someone who can help me resolve problems, someone who has a different approach to a lesson I’m trying to teach, or someone who will listen and respond online if I am frustrated and just need to vent. Whereas 30 years ago I counted on the help of 5-6 teachers who always joyfully came to my rescue on those difficult days, today I can count on scores of online teachers I have never met physically and probably never will.

Sometimes when I have had a rough day and express that frustration in a Facebook status, Amy, my teacher pal from Texas, responds to commiserate. Her message is usually only a sentence or two, but that affirmation or commiseration is often all I need to help me make it through the day.

Maybe I’m the only one who feels this way, but I believe the Internet has reduced teacher isolation exponentially. Yes, I know an online teacher cannot take the place of a teacher we see each day at school, but that virtual help is so much more than what we had ten, twenty, or thirty years ago.

Do you think teachers are more isolated today?

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Year after year, new students flood into our classrooms, and our lives center around those students for months.

Then they leave.

I spent the first six years of my teaching career as an eighth-grade teacher. At the end of the year, my students said good-bye and moved on to high school.  I was proud of them and thrilled that they were going to high school, but I missed them. I rarely saw any of them after they left my classroom.

Throughout the years, those children, the children portrayed in the photo above, have remained children in my mind. I know they continue to grow after they leave me, but I still see them as the awkward thirteen year olds who sat inside my classroom.

Today I logged into Facebook and sent birthday wishes to a student who sat inside my eighth-grade classroom many years ago during my second year of teaching. In my message, I joked that she must be about 14 now. Sherry responded,

LOL! 45! Can you believe it!!!! Thanks, Ms. Parrott! You are still my favorite!!!

45!

No wonder I am tired!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

On my way to school each morning before daybreak, I used to pass the same man walking down the road, a sweater swung over his shoulder, lunch bag in hand, eyes glaring at the pavement, never looking up. Instinctively, I waved, but he never responded.

Weeks passed and it became a game to see if I could get his attention, but even a single, admonitory horn blast in the still morning air caused him only to take a step off the road and continue his conventional walk toward – I never knew where.

I wanted to yell “Wake up, old man; the world’s passing you by,” but rational responses prevailed. It’s a sinuous, hilly road, and scenery is limited before dawn. I made up stories to pass the time. One day he was a stockbroker, the next day a hit-man, a poet, a cellist, a traveling preacher, and a tenor for the local operatic society on his way to the VFW. Once, I even considered the possibility that he was a philanthropist who had given away millions in an effort to live closer to nature. I was young and idealistic. I couldn’t accept the fact that the man was merely a laborer, probably minimum wage, a workman with no future other than walking every day to work, a man who never truly touched life.

Months passed, and I named him Bartleby – Bartleby on his way to death. It was cruel, but semi-darkness evokes sinister feelings. I drove on. “Have a good day, Bartleby!” In the stifling morning air before sun-up as I followed the man’s shape in my rear-view mirror, I could almost hear his response: “I would prefer not to,” as darkness enveloped his body.

“Wake up, old man!  The world’s passing you by!”

I received my best advice about teaching that year, my first year in the classroom, but, like most advice, it came much too late.

Randy sat on the back row in my third-period class. He was a wall-hugger, content with anonymity. Meanwhile, I was a pure English teacher in those days. I taught the parts of speech; simple, compound, complex, compound-complex sentences, onomatopoeia, alliteration, personification, and epiphany. I moved quickly; there was so much to learn and so little time. “Better keep up, kids, or I’ll leave you behind!”

Randy hugged the wall, and I listed the zeros daily. The kid was fifteen years old, several years behind in reading and failing every class, but his parents never called the school. They just didn’t care!

By spring, the biography unraveled. Randy lived right up the street in a run-down shack, its sagging front porch propped up with concrete blocks. Forgotten, long-ago useless cars spotted the yard where daffodils and geraniums should have bloomed. Randy caught the bus down the road so that other students wouldn’t see where he lived.

In all of the years that Randy and his brothers and sisters had been in school, no teacher had ever made contact with the parents. There was no phone, and letters mailed home were returned the following day by one of the embarrassed children who reported that no one in the house could read.

Often, food was short.

I felt sorry for him. His childhood was so different from my own. Poverty was something I recognized only in magazines. With a callow, black-and-white assessment, I thought I understood Randy. He had enough anxiety in his life without me creating more. He hugged the wall, and I rarely intervened. If he found trouble in the work I gave, I patted him on the shoulder in the condescending way that rookie teachers exhibit so frequently, and I gave him an easier assignment. When he turned in a paper, I automatically gave him a much higher grade than the other students, even when I knew it was not his best work. When he was tired and put his head on his desk, I allowed him to sleep right through my class. At no time did it ever occur to me that a TRUE teacher would have sat down beside Randy and said, “I know you’re having trouble, but I also know you can do the work. Let me help you get started.”

Randy dropped out of school the last day of spring quarter, and that is when an “old-timer” a “lifer” in teaching who had grown up in Techwood Homes, America’s first public housing unit, approached me. Despite terrible odds, with the help of a few good teachers who were willing to take extra time with her, she had graduated from high school, graduated from college, and dedicated her life to helping students. “Don’t ever give up on a kid like that,“ she told me. “Too many people already have, and he doesn’t need anyone else feeling sorry for him. You’re all that stands between that kid and the future.”

The report card shows that he failed my class, but I know how much I failed Randy. He needed encouragement, and I taught him symbolism. He needed direction and someone to show him how to succeed, and I talked about hyperbole and assonance. He needed someone to care, and I marked zeros and watched him hug the wall. It was so easy to do; everyone else had also given up on him.

As trite as it sounds, experience is often the best teacher.  Today, whenever I’m tempted to give up on a student, I think back to Randy. The day that memory no longer arouses action, I’ll walk away from my classroom forever. Perhaps I couldn’t have changed him, but the most haunting memory of all is that either through lack of effort, misguided compassion, or insufficient desire, I never really tried.

Full of hope, one morning in the following fall, I watched as the headlights captured two approaching figures on the side of the road. In the darkness of the early morning, it was impossible to differentiate father from son as they walked toward – I never knew where.

I wish I had a second chance with Randy.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

More than any other variable in education — more than schools or curriculum — teachers matter.

This week’s Atlantic article about teaching should be required reading for every American teacher, teacher in training, and education professor.

What Makes a Great Teacher?

We frequently make excuses in education and try to explain why students don’t learn. Twenty years of Teach for America data, however, shows that regardless of school or the socioeconomic level of the students, many teachers in the course of one school year help students make over a year’s worth of improvement.

What do great teachers do?  According to the article, they

• Set goals for their students and always look for new ways to accomplish those goals.
• They engage students and parents in accomplishing those goals.
• They focus on student learning at all times.
• They plan and work tirelessly and thoughtfully.
• They refuse to make excuses for learning.

The article then provides specific strategies that great teachers incorporate in their classrooms and also delineates the teacher qualities that appear to be most important when hiring new teachers.

Information in the article is based on Teaching as Leadership, a new book Teach for American will publish  in February. I can’t wait to read it.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

It’s New Year’s, and I suppose its time to disclose my teacher resolutions for the year.

• I have such a hard time keeping my mouth shut during class discussions, and I know I would be a better teacher if I allowed students to participate more as I participate less.  Hence, I resolve to use the World Cafe approach to discussions at least once every other week. (I’ve written about this method several times. For more information, type “World Cafe discussion” in the search box on the right.)

• For years I have heard teachers, parents, and students declare that red ink is upsetting to students.  I have never really believed there was much validity behind this claim, but just in case these people are right, I’m going to switch to another color this year. I’m giving up my favorite red Flairs and grading in green ink. Will green ink really make a difference? I am inclined to think it will make little difference or I would have changed long ago, but I’m going to give it a try.

• I have  always scoffed at the idea that English teachers need to teach visual literacy. Who needs any special talent or skill to understand a photo, cartoon, or video? Several incidents recently, however, persuaded me that some of my students might benefit from more discussion of visuals. This year I’m going to include more opportunities for students to study and discuss visuals, particularly photos and editorial cartoons.

• Finally, although I generally do a good job of recognizing and thanking good students, this year I resolve to write at least three notes per week to students, parents, or former students.

That’s it!  Four resolutions.

Teaching resolutions are so much easier than personal resolutions.

At least teaching resolutions don’t revolve around losing weight!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott