By Any Means Necessary

It gets better.

If you’re a new teacher, right about now—October—is when you should be asking yourself, “Dear God, what kind of hideous mistake have I made?”

It’s okay. Really. It gets better.

I distinctly remember the beginning of my third year realizing I’d made it to November without a crying jag. That’s because it does improve—though, no question, the first two years are tough. They can be made easier, however, by adjusting a few things. The most important adjustment is to remember this: it’s the kids who need the education, not you.

I know there’s all this talk about the evils of “the sage on the stage,” the perils of the perspective that a pupil is “an empty vessel that needs to be filled,” and criticism of the canon. But, just entre nous, that’s all a distraction. The important thing to remember is: the kids need to learn stuff.

And yes, you will learn too. And yes, the kids come to you crammed with ideas and insight and information and it would be horrible if you crushed their spirit or tried to replace their cultural heritage or… well, those books and articles are out there. You can read them another time. For now, we’re focusing on how to make your teaching life easier while getting the kids to learn more.

It’s really not that hard. The secret is: the kids need to do work.

Not necessarily homework.

In fact, lets have a little sidebar about homework, shall we?

If homework isn’t organic and meaningful, then stop it. Kids don’t need to be hassled and you don’t need the extra work. Busy work* drove me nuts when I was a student (you too, I’ll bet) and it drove me nuts to watch colleagues assign busy work then whine about how much grading they had to do! Something has to go and that something should be useless homework. If you can’t seriously defend, in pedagogical and muggle terms, why each bit of homework is necessary, then chuck it and save yourself and your students some grief.

But back to the kids needing to do work.

A colleague of mine, an African American gentleman, used to have “By Any Means Necessary” in big letters over his chalkboard as he taught. Some faculty found this unnerving (“Ooh, that Malcolm X guy, wasn’t he all violent?” Sigh…) but the teacher explained, “My kids need to understand that education used to be denied to us. It is our responsibility to get our education by any means necessary. That means if we have to go in at lunch and ask questions or stay after for a tutorial session, or raise our hands and ask what everyone else in class was too scared to ask, well then…that’s what we have to do.”

He was a rockin’ teacher.

And last year there was the time I got into a very uncomfortable conversation on the curricular side of this issue.
“How’s your 102 class going?” A PhD candidate teaching freshman rhetoric classes asked me.
“Great,” I said, “They’re reading, they’re debating, they’re finding rhetoric everywhere.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Lucky.”
“Why?” I asked, “Your class not going so well?”
“No. I’ve made the class easier and easier and I just can’t take away any more assignments. They just wont do anything!”
It was everything I could do not to holler “stop dumbing it down!” Kids aren’t stupid, but they are easily bored. If you remove the challenge, then you also remove any chance of an engaging class discussion or discovery. Remove chances for cognitive dissonance and you’ve removed chances for kids to learn.

The solution to all of these problems is the same—the responsibility for students’ educations must sit with them, not you. So set the bar high—then make sure the kids know they can always come to you for help. Expect much of them—but be available when they need a boost. You can tell the difference pretty quickly between a kid who needs a little extra help and a spoiled kid who is just whining to find a way to get an easy A.

If you eliminate busy work, and you make sure that everything you have the kids do in class exceeds your state standards (because, lets be honest, it’s hard to do worse than most state standards), and you make sure that what you teach will organically help the kiddos on their mandated tests (as opposed to teaching to the test), and you let them know that you are always there to help if they need it, then you’ve bullet-proofed your pedagogy and you’ve put the responsibility for getting an education on the kids. You provide, they take (and, we hope, expand on).

After I implemented all of this in my own classroom I had very easy parent teacher conferences—when the student was there. They generally went something like this:
The parent would often start by asking “So why did Jeanette get a C-?”
“Good question,” I’d say, “Jeanette, why do you think you got a C-?”
“Um…” Jeannette would hesitate, ” ‘Cuz maybe I didn’t do all my work.”
“What do you mean? I saw you doing your reading every night?” the parent is clearly surprised by the revelation.
“Yeah, but I didn’t do the notes and I didn’t write all of my papers.”
“Why not?”
“They were hard?”
Which is around when I’d jump back in, “So why didn’t you come to see me before school or at lunch or after school?”
“I dunno?”
“Jeanette,” says the exasperated parent, “you mean your teacher was here all those times for you to go to for help and you didn’t go see her?”
“I guess not.”
“So, Jeanette,” I’d say encouragingly, “You’re going to come in for help from now on, right? I mean, if you need it.”
“Yes.”
“Great! Then I don’t expect to see a grade like this at the end of the semester. I know you can do better.”

It’s amazing what happened in class when the assumption being made about the child was that they could do the work rather than hearing, “well, I know the material was challenging for Jeanette…”. Who wants to hear that?

This isn’t a plea for using peer editing instead of taking the papers home yourself, nor is it a way to eliminate all work so that neither you nor the students have as much to do. It’s about making judicial choices. Do the kids need to learn to take notes? Then teach them—once or twice. Then reinforce the skill by having them use it for the rest of the year. Occasionally do spot checks and have students share how they structured their notes as a way to review for a test. If you get them using what you’ve taught them, they’ll remember it better.

You teach science but know that your kids need to write better? Reinforce it. Expect better writing and give a hyphenated grade, “you got a 20/20 on content but only a 10/20 on mechanics. You need to check your spelling and make sure you’re using complete sentences.” Occasionally put an exemplary lab report on the overhead and point out where the organization is sterling, where the sentences sound clear and forceful. You don’t have to know grammar to recognize a well-answered question in your field.

Be mindful of what you’re actually asking the kids to learn. If you find, like my colleague above did, that what the kids were learning is that your homework is a waste of their time and what you have learned is that grading all those papers is overwhelming and doesn’t seem to be doing anything positive for the kids anyway, then who is benefiting? It’s time to cut bait and get back to land to figure out what must stay and what can go.

*Busy Work=work that acts as filler, that makes it look like you are teaching something or like the kids are learning something but in reality is just sucking up time and pushing a pencil across a page. Good homework is something that will be used the next day in class—reading, prewriting, drafting—or something that can’t be done easily in class, like research.

And a little bonus for you! Taylor Mali on proofreading (and while I’ve seen most of these errors on papers myself, you probably shouldn’t watch this with the under 13 crowd).