By Nate Reaven

I was so upset with one of my students today. He wasn’t in my class, but I saw him immediately after walking through the halls. He ditched. He’s a ditcher. This was particularly upsetting because he is one of my brightest students. He believes he has a career in baseball, and he very well might. He believes that if baseball does not work out that he can become a fire fighter.

While these are fine career options, I am an educator. I naturally and inherently believe that education needs to be involved somehow, particularly when the other two job options are primarily based upon physical stamina. What happens to my student when he is physically no longer able to be a firefighter or baseball player?

His words? “I’m screwed.”

This is one of my smarter, more talented students. He has potential boiling out of his fingertips.

I told him this, and said I was incredibly disappointed in his actions.

He then told me something that rocked me.

“No one has ever told me that before.”

No one has ever told you that you are talented, and capable? No one has ever told you that you have the ability to succeed at whatever you want as long as you put in the time and the work? No one has told you that you can do it?

Blegh.

Nope. Not once. Not even a hint. Not even a suggestion of promise.

The good? I hopefully got through to him. The bad? He’s a junior in high school who doesn’t believe in himself academically, despite his many natural gifts.

The point? Maybe now, he knows.

By Nate Reaven

I started student teaching today, but I think that instead of discussing this exciting milestone in my life, I would like to offer some exposition to this week. This year we have a new principal at my Wildly Diverse High School (the name I have assigned to my high school where I am student teaching), and as a result many changes have taken place from last summer until now. In a school that attempts to teach about 3,500 every year, there were 40 new hires, many of which were first or second year teachers. Additionally, nearly every department chair was replaced. Murals were replaced, mottos changed, and ideas altered.

The first day of our preparatory week, our principal gave us an hour-long speech. He said there were problems at Wildly Diverse High School, but that was no excuse. He told us to ignore other responsibilities in favor of doing our jobs – in other words, in exchange for teaching our students. Success for every student does not appear to be just a slogan to him, but something worth striving for – a high, but still reachable goal. I found his excitable, energetic demeanor inspiring.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the talk though, was instead his focus on how to teach. He discussed taking two or three core skills the students need to focus on – tone, square roots, grammar, etc, and pounding those skills into our student’s heads. Teaching our students a little bit is better than teaching them nothing. He discussed how teaching the test was a good thing, a goal, an obvious answer to a question of curricula. This was the first and most overt example of politicking I have ever experienced for a specific type of educational doctrine from someone who was in a position of authority over me. It was a little off-putting. I do not necessarily disagree with my principal’s philosophy, but I certainly found it slightly off-putting, this explicit educational directional road map for the rest of the year.

Sure, my Wildly Diverse High School has problems – what high school doesn’t?  My question is who should be the one to dictate how we are instructed to teach? Administration? Politicians? Teachers? Students? Honestly, I do not know.

All I know is that as I begin my first semester teaching in a real-life school this week, and I am doing all I can to scrap by. Should I be worried about this sort of thing? Should I put my nose to the grindstone and focus on my 104 students? Should I speak my mind and live with the consequences? I am not sure how to assume leadership roles while simultaneously recognizing my role as a teacher with absolutely no job-security. As a student teacher, I haven’t even received a paycheck yet!

This is a tricky balance. Which side do I lean toward more?

By Nate Reaven

As a contrast to lovely counterpart on the east coast, I too, am going to discuss the Common Core standards recently approved in nearly half the states across the country (and counting). I will provide a similar warning, and say that I too, am a rookie teacher, and so my thoughts, opinions, and beliefs are all malleable. You can talk me into changing my mind on nearly all these points.

1) Common Core CAN HELP fix the national standards problem: Eric brings up an interesting point here. Namely that these standards are unacceptable because of their complete glossing-over of such classes as history, art, music, physical health, languages, and computer science. While I 100% completely agree that these subjects need to be taught in the classroom, I believe that, because of an infinitesimal amount of political, emotional, and ethnic differences, the education community needs to prioritize. My belief is that, without question, math and reading are the two most important subjects in school. When a student does not know how to read, they will not succeed. Beginning in third grade a student switches from learning how to read and transitions to using their reading to learn. This is why as Hilary Clinton said, “There are states in our country who actually plan how many prison beds they will need by looking at third grade reading scores. They look at the failure rates and they extrapolate how many prison spots they’re going to need in 10 to 15 years.”  Math is a similar foundation for the rest of learning. Without math, students are unable to understand science, computer science, and engineering – any of the hard sciences. These two subjects are the basis and foundation to nearly all of our academic learning as students. This is not an argument for staying satisfied with these two subjects, but instead an argument to not nitpick because we haven’t reached the other subjects yet.

2) Common Core CAN improve the current testing situation: While I agree with Eric here, that the current testing practices need to be rethought, I do not agree with him in the how. I believe that ideally, we as teachers, should want to teach to the test. If we as teachers taught to the test, it would mean that the skills the test is assessing are acceptable, they’re meaningful, and give the students the best possible chance of success once they have finished high school. I don’t really care if my students will walk away loving Romeo and Juliet or not, (okay, I care a little), as long as they know how to write well, and are able to think about what they’re reading. Why should that not be our goal as teachers – to give our students the best possible chance at success? And so, I think these standards while not the highest in the country (that would be Massachusetts), certainly hold a large part of our country more accountable – the states with the lowest standards. True testing is based on arbitrary cutoffs, true they are politically manipulated, true four-hour long multiple choice tests were never, ever, ever a good idea. But creating a clear, common standards system can at the very least move us in the right direction of creating an assessment which the entire country can be based upon. How is that not a good thing?

3) Common core CAN affect classrooms in a positive way: Here, Eric and I agree in every way. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that we should want to teach to the test, because that means the test is assessing the skills that we want to give to our students. Historically, students have received vastly different levels of education not only from school to school – but from classroom to classroom. This is unacceptable. Creating a consensus amongst the standards is crucial if we are going to stop large disparities from continuing in our schools (well that, and an infinitely smaller summer break).

4) Common core CAN lead to a more unified reform of education: Again, Eric and I agree. Because the United States is such a melting pot, it is often difficult to find consensus in anything. Democrat or Republican? Gay Marriage? Edward or Jacob? It’s intense! And so, if the country is able to agree on anything at all, we should all celebrate. When we as a country find such a large consensus on something as controversial as educational standards – well that is on par with Moses parting the sea – it just does not happen. If these standards can become more accepted amongst the education community (specifically teachers), the possibilities (sorry for the cliché) are endless.

I too am excited about these standards. I think that they offer great hope to the education community – but far more specifically – to the students who will be affected by them the most. These standards are nowhere close to the final step, but at least we are going in the right direction.

By Nate Reaven

The question of classroom management has become an issue lately at my summer school. I have always heard of classroom management as something to corral the animals.  I have heard classroom management as the fence surrounding the acceptable, and keeping the unacceptable out of reach. Now, while I just made that simile up, I think it adds value to what it means to have a well-managed classroom.

A fence with a hole will be exploited immediately by the animals inside. Similarly, if I create a hole in my classroom management, my students will exploit this until the end, sealing my downfall as a quality teacher immediately. If I treat one student with any hint of favoritism, or another student with any hint of personal dislike, my students will no longer trust me, and instead attempt to try me as a person, as oppose to challenging themselves as students.

For some reason this does not feel like the silver bullet that I am looking for in my classroom management. So often I have seen teachers fall victim to the “New Teacher Disease,” where they are only able to rule their classroom with discipline and negativity. Instead of praising students for intelligent answers, they will call out students for speaking out of turn or not raising their hands. They believe that a quiet classroom is a good classroom.

I have never really subscribed to this paradigm. I believe that students inherently want to succeed. True, it oddly seems to be cool to be unintelligent amongst urban youth these days, but I sincerely believe that when given the right motivation and finding the right teacher, that intelligence can be seen as the right path to go down. But a student cannot become a passionate learner in a quiet classroom.

Take a second. Think to yourself about the most excited you have ever been in a classroom. Were you silently reading or writing in a corner only academically and intellectually interacting with yourself? Were you listening to the teacher drone on about simple or complex sentences? Or were you instead working on a project? Were you in class interacting with a friend or two about how to make a volcano? Or, were you jumping out of your seat because of the way the teacher expressed their ideas?

I’m not sure what your answer was, but I would bet that it was probably during a time when you were using your hands, your body, your voice and your ability to express yourself. Not just writing down your thoughts and showing them to only your teacher.

Unfortunately, for those new teachers that have contracted the “New Teachers Disease,” this means that their classrooms need to be a tiny bit chaotic (if chaos can be tiny that is). And I welcome that. If my students are not yelling, they are not learning (okay, that might be a little hyperbolic, but wouldn’t that be more fun?).

I guess what I am trying to say is that you need to get your students excited about learning. If they are bored, they will act out. And then they will not be excited about anything except finding a way to get through that hole in your classroom management-fence.

By Nate Reaven

Leading up to our first day of school, we were instructed to call the parents of our students. We will be calling these parents every week, but these were the first phone calls of the summer. These were reminder phone calls to both the inexperienced parents with students coming for the first time to the program, and the grizzled veterans – the parents of students with multiple years under their belt. Because I’m teaching the rising ninth graders, the oldest students, nearly all of the parents I talked to were occupants of the second category – grizzled veteran.

We were instructed to remind these academically minded parents about what time to arrive, where to pick up their bus, what they needed to bring – logistics. These phone calls were going fine – until I met Julie, the grandmother of one of my students, Elizabeth

Julie was fantastic. She was clearly aware and interested in her granddaughter’s experience over the summer. But more than that, Julie was interested in her future.  Her daughter is smart, she is just not very good at English – she’s a slow reader, she told me. Elizabeth was just accepted into the International Baccalaureate program, she tells me, and is quite excited about the math program there. She wants to know what strategies I have to help her learn how to read faster and with more understanding, and I tell her that I’ll try to do my best.

After reading Garrett’s post about calling to sell students on learning – on enriching their lives, I realized how much of a pleasure it was to find a grandmother in, let’s be clear, a difficult situation. The students in this program are only allowed in if they meet certain criteria. Specifically, low socio-economic status, usually a person of color, and someone who has been underserved by their public school options. The students, however, are usually motivated, excited, and ready to learn.

Garrett is forced to convince his students to learn. I am forced to teach Romeo and Juliet to kids who want to learn about Shakespeare, but to the same demographic of students. Garrett walked into an empty classroom, while my fellow teachers and I ran up to every student as they arrived and cheered as they exited the bus. We were creating a culture of excitement around learning.

I do not know what to do about this. I suppose keep doing what I am doing, right? Teaching. Learning. Teaching.

I do know one thing though. I am glad for that conversation I had with Julie, the spectacular grandmother. She gave me hope.