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What a Lawnmower Teaches Us About Education

My new manual lawn mower

It’s rewarding to have time to work in our yard, which after reseeding has begun to thrive in the rocky soil of our patch of land at the foot of Mt. Baldy Road.

Ours is a tricky yard: a third of an acre of shifting sunlight and shadow that seems to change to direct sunlight by summer. So finding the right time to seed and fertilize requires patience and effort if the yard, which has a nasty habit of turning brown, is to survive and thrive.

While pushing my manual mower, I was thinking about how the older tools are somehow more efficient, and it was difficult not to think the same way about teaching. Despite all the technology, is our teaching better than it was, let’s say, a decade ago? Are the minds of our students taking hold like the struggling grass in my yard? Do we as teachers need to reach for more basic tools?

It’s not a far-fetched analogy: kids need tending, and they need the right tools. I think teachers might be better off putting away the power tools and using the hand tools. A little old-fashioned nurturing goes a long way.

Classroom management isn’t easy

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times about the difficulty of managing a classroom struck me as being spot on.

The article was right in mentioning that among the top reasons teachers fail and eventually leave the profession is their inability to manage their classrooms. In fact, according to the Times findings, the vast majority of California teachers who are fired and contest their termination are often cited for poor classroom management.

What can teachers do to manage their classes better? It’s not all that mysterious. As the article points out,

Teachers must be consistent in their message and consequences, lay a strong foundation of expectations early in the school year, follow through with promised punishments when children misbehave and remain dispassionate and unflappable.

Creativity is a Thing of the Past

Last summer I came across a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson titled Do Schools Kill Creativity in which Sir Ken makes the case for reintroducing creativity into our lessons. Watching his video lecture made me feel that magic would soon happen in my classroom. Robinson’s argument is simple: the most effective workers of tomorrow will be the innovators, the creators, those who march to the beat of a different drummer.

Sadly aware that my profession does little now to encourage the kind of creativity Sir Ken was talking about, I faced a challenge—and I’ve now spent the better part of the last 6 months trying to find ways to encourage creativity in my own students.

Toward this end I have been a complete failure.

Creativity is a thing of the past, Ken—something from another age, an anachronism, a dinosaur in Central Park.

Teachers are rarely if ever encouraged to be creative: Spend a few months in a public school teacher’s shoes and you’re going to discover a job bereft of creativity. It’s all about the tests now. Nothing else.

Sorry to burst your bubble, Ken.

The Crucible Page

I’m in the process of moving all of The Crucible material to The Crucible page. See the link on the above navigation menu.

A boy and his skateboard

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A student of mine, Julio, wanted me to post this video of him and his friends demonstrating their skateboarding skills. That way, as he put it, “everyone can look at it and say ‘damn that guy is so sexy.’” I have to admit there’s real joy in this video. Sometimes we teachers forget how much fun our kids get out of life, perhaps because we expect them to do so much work. By the way, the kid who keeps putting his palm in front of the lens kind of kills it.

Introspective Day

Today was one of those days. Teachers know what I mean by that.

It was the sort of day that might have found me sitting at a coffee house writing in my journal…if I had a journal and if I had the time to stop on the way home.

The gist of what’s bugging me can be summarized as follows: I have too many areas for improvement.

I have to finish my classroom arrangement, which I should have completed last month. My desk is still a mess with no proper place to do my grading. My lesson planning has sucked; I can’t seem to get anything up on the board. Bellwork has become a joke; I need to find a way to combine SSR with journal writes. I also need to consistently enforce the tardy policy, which in my room means that if you’re not in your seat and on task when the bell rings, you’re tardy. No excuses. Lastly, I need to monitor my students better. I’ve gotten too lazy and spend too much time behind my desk and not moving around.

What do they say about a moving target being hard to hit?