Lest I Sound Self-Righteous

Today, as I reflected on my last three posts, all of which are aimed at offering those outside the teaching profession a look into my world, I began to wonder this: "Am I painting an unrealistic picture of myself?  Am I portraying myself as some model teacher who is the Mother Theresa of the educational landscape?  Am I sounding snippy, defensive, and egotistical?"

Thus, I want to attempt to make one thing clear.  I'm no Superman.  I'm not the last bastion of virtue in public education.  I don't have all the answers. I'm not a martyr, and I certainly don't want anyone to ever think I have delusions that being a teacher makes me more righteous, noble, or persecuted than the next guy.

I'm a work in progress, a guy with good intentions who is learning day by day. I'm not always brimming with compassion. I don't always make the right calls when it comes to managing students. In short, I have the capacity to "fail" students, not by giving them F's, but by simply not being the best I can be for them.  At times I may talk like I'm the most dedicated professional on the planet, but there are days when...well...there are days, right? 

However, on a good day with the wind behind me, I'm a little more wise than I was the day before. I honestly believe the trajectory of my professional life is positive, though sometimes my progression is a barely noticeable upward grade at best.

As is true for all of us, educator or otherwise, my struggle is to do the best I can because that's what is right and just for me to do. We all have our rough patches, and none of us can do our job perfectly at all times, but that does not excuse us from striving to fulfill our calling to the best of our ability. Such striving calls each and every one of us to deep reflection and, at times, brutally honest self-evaluation.  

To offer just a bit of insight into this struggle, as I've experienced it in my profession, here is a selection of a piece I wrote this summer entitled, "Primum Non Nocere," translated from the Latin as "First, Do No Harm."

Primum Non Nocere
If there was one goal I had when I got into this profession, it was to make children love writing.  I wanted them to understand the power of the written word and to respect the potency of the pen.  I wanted students to be freed to explore all aspects of life through their writing and to inject their own voice and personality into the world around them.

So, how did I go about achieving such a lofty goal? It was simple.

1. With dictatorial authority, I assigned enough writing work that my students would likely have traded places with the unfortunate souls picked to labor in the construction of the pyramids at Giza. I saddled my poor pupils with an unholy amount of work, much of it assigned in an attempt to fatten the gradebook, and explained it away as just a part of "rigorous" course expectations. Additionally, when students wrote, it was always game time.  Unlike football, a sport in which practice time exceeds game time by a five to one margin, my writing assignments were all high stakes games intended to determine winners and losers.  When the assignments are as numerous as the stars, there's no time for practice, so my I made sure my students knew I expected perfection in every writing...all 10,557.3 of them.

2. When grading that work, I taught them to respect my authority by essentially writing a counter-essay on their paper.  My best estimates are that I was routinely killing off one pen for every 1.7 essays I graded.  I offered no shortage of red-ink feedback, and while there's no way to recount every insightful comment I offered students, I can assure you I had a plethora of creative ways to say, "WRONG!"

3. When my young pupils got a creative tingling in their spines and left the safety of a writing formula, often leading to poor decisions, I chastised them by asking, "Why couldn't you just have done it the way I asked?" After all, I had clearly told them that I wanted them to sound just like (insert name of professional writer here), right?

4. To really make my student love writing, I spoke of due dates as Levitical law, required students to follow arbitrary processes I don't even follow (do as I say, not as I do, right?), and made them so scared of putting a comma in the wrong place that they simply chose to abandon comma usage entirely.

5. To put the proverbial cherry on top, I preached what I didn't practice.  I pushed students to write from the heart and to wrestle with how to best express their thoughts into words...even though I hadn't in a long time. I was a teacher, not a writer.  Through the way I conducted my class, I confirmed to my students that writers were people who lived in New York, wore funny hats,  and eked out a meager living unless they were willing to write about vampires in love with humans; teachers, on the other hand, were people who weren't brave enough to move to New York, couldn't pull off wearing funny hats, or weren't desperate enough to write about vampires in love with humans.

Put simply, the medical community has the perfect word for the teaching strategies I employed early in my career: malpractice.

All of this may sound overly dramatized, and perhaps it is to some extent.  There were moments of success; not everything was a failure. However, as I reflect on the first few years I spent as an English teacher, I can clearly pick out numerous teaching tendencies that were far more detrimental to than helpful in developing my students' abilities and desire to write.  While it was definitely tough to look back and realize that I may have actually turned many a student away from writing, that harsh realization has led to a renewed and deeper commitment to the goals I had nine years ago as a new teacher.

So what's my new plan of action?

1. Practice, Practice, Practice. My students will still write...a lot.  However, whereas I used to make every writing a high stakes situation, I now plan to incorporate more freewriting as an opportunity to rehearse strategies as well as create the raw ideas from which major writings will be formed.

2. Coach more than I criticize. The best coaches instill two things in their players: confidence in their existing abilities and a drive to become better.  Few coaches, though, do this by overloading players with criticism and exasperated correction.  I should be no different.  Rather than treating student work as a fault-finding mission, I want to find every reason to affirm their successes and to encourage them to build on those.

3. Birth writers instead of cloning them. Formulas can be helpful and offer safety to developing writers, but formulas can also kill the personality that makes each writer unique. So can expecting kids to imitate professional articles used as mentor texts. In my class, I want to encourage writers to develop their own unique voice and style.  This will, undoubtedly lead to some missteps as students seek to find their voice, but that's part of the beauty of writing; there's as much to be learned in getting lost as there is in arriving!

4. Let them write like writers.  Not all writers work with solid deadlines and not all writers follow the same processes.  Friends of mine who are published writers often set their own timetables and none of them faithfully follows a one-size-fits-all writing process involving notecards, outlines, and the like.  What if students, knowing what they were expected to produce, were asked to responsibly set up their own timetable for completion?  What if students, after being exposed to different writing strategies, were allowed to develop the writing process that best suited their personality and needs?  While such propositions sound scary, they also sound a lot less like coercion than were the strongarm tactics I used to use.

5. Show them how a writer works.  It is my mission to  destroy the false perception that writers and teachers cannot be one in the same.  I am a writer. I just happen to be a writer who works in a public school.  I wrestle with ideas.  I struggle to find the right way to pen what's in my head.  I agonize over revisions.  I want my kids to see this happening.  Rather than hearing me talk about writing, I want my kids to see me write.

Only time will tell if these strategies will help me develop and inspire young writers. However, I have no doubt that these plans will, at the very least, help me live out the words of Hippocrates, "First, do no harm."

Bear in mind that this piece is still in progress.  I haven't touched it in a while, but I do plan on refining it further. As I tell my students, very little of our writing should ever truly be "done."

And why do I offer this?  I post this primarily for the following purpose: I want to assure everyone that while I may take a stand on a super-sized "high horse" from time to time...though I might shake my fist at the sky some days in spirit of self-righteous indignation, you can be assured that I am keenly aware of this fact:

On even my best days, I am an imperfect teacher (not to mention husband, father, coach, man of faith, etc.). I want to see students do great things and I really do love them, but I have failed them before and will fail them again.

It is my sincere hope that if nothing else, though, I am genuine and honest. I ask that of my students, so I have no excuse for not doing so myself.

Cash Ain't Carrots, and I Ain't A Donkey

Disclaimer: The "ain't" in the title is a clear indication I'm approaching 15 years in the Ozarks (and I wouldn't trade one of them).

In my last post of this series on public education, I touched on the issues I have with public education being run like any other business.  The focus in that post (found here) was on the idea that while teachers need, and should desire, accountability, arbitrarily firing and replacing teachers based solely on yearly high-stakes testing, which is inadequate/incomplete/ill-executed/misleading at best, is a poor way to hold educators responsible.  Teachers simply cannot be evaluated as one would evaluate managerial staff in the corporate, profit-driven world of business.

However, the current push for a more business-minded approach to public schooling does not stop at the simplistic idea of hiring and firing based on one-off test results.

Currently, many policy makers are pushing for merit pay, or as I call it, behaviorism for teachers. Behaviorism, largely based on the work of B.F. Skinner, supposes that our behaviors are primarily the results of outside forces; that to examine our own actions, we must look not inward, but to the external forces which cause us to think as we think, feel as we feel, and ultimately do as we do.

In some cases, Skinner's ideas make complete sense.

When I worked at McDonald's during my high school years, behavioral operant conditioning was a large part of the way management encouraged me to do my job with excellence. As an example, when I did well or went above and beyond the call of duty, I received some arbitrary "McDonald's Money" which I could trade in for gift cards, trinkets, or other incentives.  Additionally, when I exceeded expectations, I could reasonably expect to receive at least a modest raise during my scheduled employee review.

And hey, I won't lie to you; these and other positive reinforcements did what they were designed to do.  I do consider myself someone who wants to work hard, please people, and make a good name for myself, but let's be honest; I didn't work hard because I believed in the mission of McDonald's.  I didn't try to uphold the sanctity of the Big Mac.  I certainly wasn't busting my tail because I knew in the depths of my soul that selling people a Double Quarter-Pounder was my calling in life.  I did it because I wanted the rewards of hard work, not because the work itself had any meaning.

Now, here I am as an adult, a professional educator, with people proposing to me that I be treated like I'm back at McDonald's.

The idea of merit pay goes something like this.  Teachers who produce results (of the standardized test variety) should not only be assured of employment, they should also have the chance at bonuses commiserate with the level of his or her student's scores.

For the moment, I'll put aside such minor contentions as:

• merit pay pits teachers against one another (why would teachers share great teaching secrets when there's only so much merit money to go around?)
• merit pay would only apply to teachers in specific content areas, primarily math and science (sorry art teachers, you're apparently not  all that important)
• merit pay would do nothing to bring good teachers to low-income or inner city schools (sorry, inner-city Chicago, everybody seems to want to teach in middle-class suburbia all of a sudden...)

Here, instead, is my main contention.  I find merit pay insulting.  

If someone thinks that I'm going to, all of a sudden, start "really teaching" my students because lawmakers dangle a few extra Ben Franklins at me, they've grossly misinterpreted why I do what I do.  If a person thinks that I've had these really great teaching methods locked away in a vault and that I've been holding back on using them until the feds offered me a bonus, we probably don't hang out very often.  

Pardon me if I'm a bit uncomfortable with my government treating me like a donkey who'll follow after a cash carrot dangled two feet in front of my nose, but I'd rather just know that someone in Jefferson City or Washington, D.C. has enough faith in me to think that I might already be doing my best simply because I consider it a moral imperative, not because I can't afford a new TV.

But this debate shouldn't be about me and my thin skin, should it?  Ultimately, this debate must center around the needs of those being educated.  Merit pay, like any educational movement must address this question: "What is best for kids?" 

And to that end, merit pay appears to fail. Need proof? I won't recount the whole study, but this brief piece from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution does give the essential findings of a study done to see if merit pay actually does its job, which is not to reward people like me, but rather to best serve the needs of students (Merit Pay and Student Achievement).  

As I all but admitted the other day in my first post of this series (found here), there are certainly some teachers out there who actually are in this business for the wrong reasons.  Sadly, there are some who are more concerned with their wallets than their students. However, while the media may try to sell you the idea that such a characterization describes many of us, I assure you that is a gross and insulting misrepresentation of fact. Such people are the extremely rare cancers, aberrations that serve mainly to provide the media with just the chink in my profession's armor necessary to sell a gloom and doom narrative.

But, you know me, right?  

Business is Business...Education is Not

One of the biggest issues in education these days is the demand for teacher accountability. Largely because of our incessant need to use other countries' educational systems as our own measuring stick (even when the comparison is apples to oranges at best), we demand that teachers be held accountable for producing quantifiable results which we derive mainly from yearly high-stakes standardized tests.

Am I against accountability? Let me assure you, that is not the case. I certainly believe that teachers need to be held to high standards. Principals need to know their teachers well, examine their methods, evaluate the learning environment they create, and work to maximize the potential of each and every teacher under his or her charge. Teachers should be expected to push for excellence, motivate students, and to master/employ the most effective, proven methodologies in their practice. If a teacher doesn't expect these things of himself, he most certainly needs to be held accountable.

What I am against is accountability based solely on a business model. In the business world, the equation is generally simple: those who produce clear-cut, easily quantified and digested results will have jobs and opportunity for advancement, while those who do not produce results will be fired and replaced with new (and hopefully more successful) employees. It works in the business world, right? If a salesman can't sell, you get a new salesman. If a waiter drives customers away, you get a new waiter.

But, if you really want to apply such a business mindset to the world of education, you can't think of teachers as people with no employees under them; you have to think of teachers as managers. A manager is responsible for making sure the team underneath them is producing results. A manager has to organize the team, lead the team, put everyone in a position to produce desired results...and make the tough decisions to part ways with employees not producing.

And this is where the business model really breaks down. In the business world, a manager is generally judged on the results produced by those under their leadership. If a baseball team is winning, the general manager is a genius; if they are losing, he will need to be looking for a new place of employment. However, teachers cannot---AND THE VAST MAJORITY WOULD NOT EVEN IF THEY COULD---"fire" those on whose results he or she will be judged.

I as a teacher, do not have the freedom to cut little Johnny loose if he just isn't going to make me look good on the one-off, 40-question multiple-choice test the state claims is the ultimate, definitive measure of my efficacy as an English Language educator (this high-stakes test, by the way, contains no writing element because the state can't afford to pay people to grade it).

And would I send Johnny packing even if I could? OF COURSE NOT!!! A teacher's job is different than a business manager's job because teachers know they must prepare and educate kids when they are compliant and when they are defiant, when they sit politely and absorb information as well as when they are spewing profanity and intentionally derailing every attempt the teacher makes to do his or her job. A teacher accepts the fact that their job is to educate every kid, regardless of whether they have perfect attendance or barely show up 2/3 of the time because their parents kicked them out and now they're bouncing between relatives, friends' homes, or even the streets. A teacher knows that their job is to maximize every kid's potential whether they are a sophomore who is already prepared for college work or a senior reading on a fifth-grade level. And why are teachers like me happy to take on this charge? We do it because we know that our investment in kids' lives is too important and too complex to be monetized, digitized, or easily translated into spreadsheet data the feds can use to see how we stack up against Singapore.

Yet, in the business-model thinking that so many, especially in government positions, are pushing, a teacher's job security should primarily be based on whether or not a teacher can effectively "teach to the yearly test," a practice that robs students of an education that is rich, broad, intellectual, social, philosophical, and personalized in favor of a pre-fab, one-size-fits-all education employed not as a true investment in students, but as a desperate attempt to dominate a high-stakes test and thereby keep one's job.

As I said, I truly have no issue with teacher accountability. If you know me, you'll trust me when I say that if I begin to slide, become stagnant, develop attitudes or habits in my profession that are unhealthy, or simply am not teaching to the expectations of my principal, superintendent, or my community, I hope that someone will call me on it. Should that ever happen, I hope that I'll be given (and will have earned) the opportunity to address my shortcomings and improve. If, after having that opportunity, my leadership does not feel I can get the job done, I need to be let go.

However, like those teachers who made the difficult choice to strike in Chicago, I hope that my employment will not solely be based on a once-a-year test that is, at best, an inadequate measure of student capability...as if the data it yielded could tell you the story of:

• The young man I counseled through parental neglect.
• The young girls who've had to come and tell me that as sophomores, they've become expectant mothers.
• The kids I've fought to reach despite the fact they showed up to school high or with a severe hangover.
• The kids I've pleaded with to stick with it, stay in school, and be one of the few, if not the only, graduates in his or her family.
• The kids I mourned with when their classmate overdosed at a weekend party.

These kids (and others I don't have time to mention) may not have been in a position to produce the desired stellar test results that would afford me a business-model pat on the back, but I would never have "fired" a one of them even if I could have. Quite the contrary, I fought for each and every one of them as if they were my own, satisfied in the fact that I am a teacher, not corporate middle-management; I'm more than a simple test-derived number used to compare, rank, sort, retain and fire.

I'm an instructor. I'm a friend. I'm a confidant. I'm a coach. I'm a motivator. I'm a discipliner. I'm a counselor. I'm an example. I'm a provider. I'm a father-figure. I'm a teacher.

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You Know Me, Right?

A few weeks back, Chicago educators took to the streets in a strike, protesting (among other things) out-of-control class sizes and a teacher evaluation system that puts the majority of its eggs in the basket of standardized testing. The nation watched as battle lines were drawn between the Chicago teacher's union and the city's mayor, former Obama Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel.

As the conflict blossomed, I was not shocked at the initial spin the media put on this issue; of course, the teachers were painted by many in the media as greedy, lazy, completely apathetic towards the needs of their students. Understand, I was still insulted by the way much of the mainstream media portrayed the teachers, but I can't act as if there was anything novel about the disparaging characterization they received; I suppose such "slings and arrows" have just become repetitive and routine in the eyes of the laborers at which they are launched.

I've been in this business nine years and I've heard people in my line of work denigrated by the media more times than I can recount, so I'm not shocked when people want to paint my colleagues and I as individuals who weren't good enough to do anything real and, therefore, just defaulted to teaching in lieu of getting an actual job. I have come to see it as par for the course when someone assumes all teachers just quit trying when they get a tenured contract. I'm no longer surprised when people talk of public education as a black hole of waste and hold their tax dollars over educators' heads as some sort of bludgeoning tool. I'm sadly used to people making snide comments about how no serious profession gets three months of paid vacation. Even as I record these things right now, it bothers me that these are familiarities.

Are there teachers in this business for the wrong reasons? Sure. Are all teachers equally effective and/or gifted in their craft? Of course not. I get it; honestly, I do.

Still, I'm tired of this broad brush that's being used to paint me, my colleagues, and now the Chicago teachers as incompetent, self-focused, ineffective, and easily-replaceable. I'm tired of people talking like my job could be done by any hack. I'm tired of hearing the same people who call documentaries by Michael Moore gross misrepresentations of truth full of hasty generalizations and boldfaced falsehoods turn around and pretend docs like "Waiting For Superman" are a completely accurate depiction of reality.

Many of you know me, right?

Do I whine about my salary? Do I piddle my summer away watching daytime television? Did I sign a tenured contract and begin showing movies everyday instead of teaching?  Don't I fight for my kids day in and day out? Haven't I  given up personal, non-contract time to go the extra mile with kids on essays? Didn't I use nearly two months of my summer "vacation" spending my discretionary income on gas and  tuition so that I could continue to grow as a teacher in both philosophy and practice?

If you're reading this, I feel like you probably know me well enough to answer those questions accurately.  You, more than likely, know what kind of person I am.  You know what I want for kids.

But do you know the media? Do you really know them?  Do you know their motivations and goals?  In all humility, I ask you to consider this: is the media more interested in selling an alarmist story in which the educational sky is falling or giving you the truth in which I treat your kid as a precious individual for whom I'd do this job even if it paid minimum wage?

In the coming days, I'm planning on posting some thoughts on education, not to gripe or moan or complain, or even to boldly defend public education against all criticism--it certainly has its deep, deep issues that need addressed. Should you read any of these posts, I honestly pray that you'll have enough faith in me to know this: I only post them so that you can get your information from someone you know (and trust, hopefully) rather than Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Ann Coulter, or some other media source mainly in the business of creating and selling a crisis, regardless of how much reality they have to alter/spin/cut/ignore in its manufacture.

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A Fight Worth Fighting

This week at school, we had an incident...a cutoff jeans wearin', Confederate flag wavin', line-crossin' incident.

For context, a few years back, some young men at BHS, dissatisfied with the prescribed spirit day themes and gluttonous for attention (positive OR negative), decided to buck the system and stage their own spirit day, an anti-spirit day of sorts. Dubbed "White Trash Wednesday," the day was marked by a small contingent of young guys attempting to look as stereotypically backwoods as they could. Flannel shirts without sleeves, cutoff jeans, muck boots, a healthy dose of orange hunting gear; all standard apparel for the day.

In its inception, this move was laughed off as a simple boneheaded joke; boys will be boys, right? Unfortunately, our parents, staff, and students couldn't see exactly where this was headed.

In the years to come, the shorts got shorter, midriffs began to be common, the redneck sterotyping became more crude, and--this I consider the saddest part--the stars and bars of the Confederate flag became a unifying symbol for participants. In addition, the revelry spread beyond a few young men with country in their blood and expanded to include females ready and willing to join in the counter-festivities, too often sporting outfits that looked like they'd come from the female wardrobe of the Dukes of Hazard set.

With our hesitance to truly confront the issue for so long being a primary culprit, what started as a silly, one-off gag grew into a perennial problem at the high school. However, this year, the line had to be drawn; this yearly non-school-sanctioned distraction needed to end.

I'll spare you the long form of the story, but I can assure you our administration handled the issue courteously and firmly. Students were simply told (a week in advance), those dressed in a manner that fit the WTW mold would be asked to return home, change, and head back. No harm, no foul; do what you want before school, just make sure you're out of costume and ready to go when school fires up at 8:10.

Most students obliged, others balked; some students walked away, some flipped administrators the bird as they did so. I've been in public education for 9 years now, so I'm no stranger to such disrespectful actions. However, for one student, it didn't stop there.

One young student, a kid I've had in class and grown to appreciate, made the decision to turn the moment into a statement. Coming back into school in full WTW regalia, and with Confederate flag flying, he essentially attempted to play the part of the martyr by riling other students up against the administration he felt was denying him the "right" to do whatever he wanted while at school.

And that's the hill he chose to stand--and earn a lengthy suspension--upon.

So here is what struck me in the wake of the incident. Somewhere in this young man's poor choice, there is actually a desirable behavior. We should not want our kids to be so passive that they stand for nothing; we should want them to dig their heels in against greed, prejudice, injustice, and the like...this particular young man's furor and indignance, if funneled in the right direction, could strike a meaningful blow against bullying, poverty, violence, or a number of other social ills.

He simply doesn't know what battle is worth fighting.

And when I thought about this for a while, I kept coming back to the same questions. Why can't he see how trite and silly his kicking and screaming is? Why can't he just trust that we have his best interests at heart and know when to push and when to be at peace? Why would he, and I'm not exaggerating, put his very future at risk just for the right to thumb his nose at a high school administration?

When I ask these questions, God tends to answer in ways that I don't always like, though in ways I very much need to hear.

Maybe I wouldn't see this so clearly if I were not a father, but it is not lost on me that children learn by watching those ahead of them. They are emulators who often take their cues from those ahead of them. Thus, the battles they fight are most likely not that dissimilar from those they've seen fought by adults.

And what types of grandiose stands do adults take? We fight to make sure our kid gets the lion's share of playing time in youth sports. We fight to dupe people into thinking we don't buy Apple products largely because they're in vogue. We fight to make sure our church appears "cool." We fight to convince people Tim Tebow is a legitimate quarterback. We wage wars over things that DO NOT MATTER, and by doing so, we train those behind us to do the same, leaving them to repeat a cycle of futility.

I work among kids and hear what bothers them. There are certainly those kids who want to stand up for something real, something vital; those who honestly want their efforts and labors to make the world a better place. Those, however, are often rare among their peers. It is far more common to find a high schooler railing against a school disciplinary procedure than to find one railing against bullying. It is easier to find a student crying to the heavens about the tardy policy than to find one crying over the fact that some kids in the lunch hall won't get a meal outside of BHS all week.

But who has taught them any better? Have I taught them and helped them believe that there are real battles that need to be fought? Have I modeled for them what it looks like to be righteously indignant when a fellow human's basic dignities are stripped away? Have I shown them what it looks like to draw a line in the sand when a person denigrates another human with a racist/sexist joke?

I know there have been times that I have, but to my own shame, I cannot tell you with any level of certainty that those instances outnumber the times I have not.

Yet this is our duty to our young people, to both tell and to show them which battles must be fought and which are of no consequence. The world will not teach them to fight poverty; it will teach them to fight for material possessions. The world won't teach them to stand against oppression; it will teach them to stand against replacement NFL referees. The world won't teach them to be their brother's keeper; it will teach them a million ways to rob people of their dignity.

For this reason, it is my prayer that God would grant us the urgency, willingness, and boldness necessary to teach young people by entering, ourselves, into battles of eternal significance, such as prescribed in Psalms 82:3-4 or Proverbs 29:7, so that we all--old and young alike--would not waste our lives on futile fights of no lasting consequence.

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Fake Believe

I saw a tweet the other day that really punched me in the gut.

There is a difference between making people feel important and believing that they are important.

Wow.  If there is a place that I struggle, it is in this area.  While I proclaim with my mouth that I believe all life was breathed into being by a loving, creative God, I know that inwardly I devalue people on a daily basis. Sadly, I know that such inward attitudes have a knack for clearly manifesting themselves regardless of my attempts to mask them. 

Here's an example.  I'm a morning planner.  I like walking into my classroom (coffee in hand), and getting right to the job of fine-tuning and finishing my lesson plans for the day.  I don't go in unprepared, but I do like to have a time of quiet solitude in which to gather my thoughts and prep materials.  However, it is usually in these moments of professional privacy that I hear a knock on my door.  Nine times out of ten, that knock is coming from a student who, nine times out of ten, has no real agenda other than just wandering past my room and dropping in to shoot the breeze.

This, of course, upsets my morning ritual, thus triggering an alarm in my brain which exclaims, "But I had plans this morning!" I think to myself, "How dare this young person amble into my 'moment of teacher zen' and throw off my routine?!"   

When I think of these moments, I cringe because the routine for dealing with such intrusion is all too familiar:

1. offer a casual (but not overly inviting) smile so they sense I'm at least semi-pleased they've come by
2. split attention between person and computer screen so it's obvious I'm working (appear anxious so as to communicate that I REALLY want to chat, but am just working furiously)
3. gently push them to a purpose so that if they did have a class-related reason for coming, they'll not beat around the bush
4. tell them (on their way out) how much I appreciate them coming by
5. lock the door upon their exit

Now, to be honest, I don't even think that this shameful procedure even counts as making someone feel important. I'm sure that it has more likely made too many people feel far less than valued.  However, even if a charade like this manages to give off some semblance of sincere concern unfortunately pitted against  dedication to my job, I know full well that I, in such moments, am not truly believing in the importance of a uniquely-gifted, God-created individual.

Few students will admit it while in school, but teachers are most kids' heroes. On an average day, many kids see and interact with their teachers and coaches more than their own parents.  I know that one of the most powerful things that can happen in the life of a student is for them to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that a teacher truly believes in and values them.  If this wasn't true, then I wouldn't be so prone to read the note my AP Lit. teacher wrote in the front cover of the Mark Twain book she gave me when I graduated high school.  Reading her kind words often restores my spirit and reinvigorates me in times of discouragement.  She saw importance in me and made sure I knew it.

I draw on her words again and again, so why would I not want to offer the same to my students?

In reality, that is the kind of effect I want to have on people. Obviously, this hits home for me in the sphere of education.  However, this desire also spills over into my interactions with my friends, family, and acquaintances. 

Ultimately, I want to truly believe these things:

• Everyone was created by a loving God (Psalm 139:13-14)
• Everyone was created to be an image bearer of their Creator (Genesis 1:26)
• Everyone was created to know God and to manifest God-given, unique giftings and talents (Romans 12:6-8, 1 Cor. 14:4-11)
• Everyone was created to know God and use their God-given talents/abilities to glorify Him (1 Peter 4:10-11)
• It is impossible to love God and devalue people who were created for His glory and for whom He sent Christ as an atoning sacrifice. (1 John 4:20)

I'm pretty sure that if these truths were to take root in my mind, when that young student wanders into my class and interrupts my final moments of preparation for a day's chaos, I'd ditch the "fake believe" routine. Instead, that student might go into their day confidently knowing that there is someone who sees them as God does: important.

Note to Self...

So, for the most part Facebook can be a vapid hole of wasted time (and I've wasted plenty on it).  However, today it did something pretty great.  I happened to run across a friend's page w/ a post from my Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Galloway on it.  Up until that point, it had been a pretty rough day in class w/ my kids not getting some stuff and not working as hard as I'd prefer them to.  When I saw that post, my mood took a sharp upturn as I immediately flashed back to my younger days and began recalling all the good memories I have from my earliest days of public education.

I'll save you individual stories, but I will tell you this.  I chose to be an educator based on the fact that, as far as I'm concerned, a lot of the best people I've ever known were educators.  Mrs. Galloway was one such teacher.  What was it that set her apart?  In her classroom, I look back and know that all of us in that room were loved.  I'm sure most days we were an incredible handful and I'm sure she had her rough days just like mine now, but my permanent picture of Mrs. Galloway is her sporting an infectious smile. This smile may have been a result of her ability to always envision 3:00 pm or June and July, but I doubt it.  I really believe we were important to her and she wanted us to know it.  This is most likely why the only degree I have or ever will have posted in my classroom is the Kindergarten Diploma she issued me back in the mid-1980's.  Side Note: I do also have my certificate that says I can count from 1-10, but I only post that because that's where my mastery of math stops.

Got me thinking...will my kids have that memory of me when they're 31 and randomly finding me on some arbitrary social networking site?  Will they think, "Mr. Love cared deeply about me and was happy just to have me around."  Or, will they simply recall me ranting about tardies, dumb decisions, and late work while all the time trying to paint myself as having the "patience of Job" (and most likely then griping because nobody in the class recognized that allusion).

I didn't just watch Dead Poets Society, Freedom Writers, Stand and Deliver, or Lethal Weapon 4 (which one of these does not belong), so this isn't a cinematically-inspired crusade to change lives...it's simpler than that.  I just need to remember:

• some kids don't feel important...to anyone.
• all kids deserve to be important...to someone.
• I am someone.

Thanks, Facebook.

Effective Score: 10, but only on the account that I had some the best teachers to ever grace a classroom.