I’m sure different teachers have different takes on this, but I pretty much always welcome any parent involvement that is not just hostility. Any degree of involvement other than that, in my experience, pays immediate and often profound dividends in at least the performance of that parent’s child.

There are different ways to be involved, and which are best depends on the particular teacher, the particular parent, the particular student, and sometimes the particular school and district. Being known helps. Just dropping in after school and introducing yourself and giving an email address, along with the expression of willingness to do anything else if the teacher ever has any ideas or suggestions. If all my students had parents who did that, my job would be much easier and all of my students would learn a lot more.

As for things like books and classroom resources, that depends a lot on where you are. Sometimes school or district-level policies make things harder for direct donations or non-approved components of curricula, and sometimes it’s pretty much all up to the teacher. Some teachers actually have such a mess of mediocre resources it’s hard to figure out what would be helpful and what wouldn’t, and unsolicited additions just end up sitting on a shelf or in a closet. Donorschoose.org is a great resource for this, and you could ask the teacher if they know of it and if they’ve ever used it, and let them know to tell you if they ever put a project up because you’ll be happy to donate.

Sometimes things like volunteering with after-school clubs or tutoring can be very nice, but sometimes awful, depending on personalities and relevant knowledge and so on—also sometimes districts have difficult policies with this, since having volunteers in contact with kids is a potential liability for them, and they usually require some sort of background check and so on. Being involved with any PTA or similar organization is helpful, too, especially if you make it clear you’re advocating for the teachers.

But with all of these things, it really comes down to the particular teacher and particular parent. So I’d just recommend putting yourself out there— give an introduction, several kinds of contact info (different teachers prefer different kinds), make yourself very easy to get ahold of, and make it clear that you’re up for helping in any way they might want it. Just don’t make it seem like you’re making any demands or expecting them to do any more work than they’re already doing. If they’re super busy and stressed out, they may not ever come up with any way for you to help; but just making yourself available can be nice, and having even that level of relationship will probably benefit your kid(s).

Rather than explaining it myself, I’ll quote from Teachers Have It Easy: the big sacrifices and small salaries of America’s teachers (Daniel Moulthrop, Nínive Clements Calegari, Dave Eggers). The rest of the book is mostly like this excerpt: brief testimony from teachers, with chapter introductions and interstitial commentary from the editors.

Julia Normand, 65, English—Goldenview Middle School,
Anchorage, Alaska

When I was working at a law firm as a computer-support person, my typical day amounted to coming to my desk with a cup of coffee and a roll. I’d sit down and go through messages, drinking my coffee. I’d greet my co-workers when they came in; I’d make a phone call to set up a meeting and plan my day. If I had to go to the bathroom, I just got up and went. I was in charge of my own body, my own life, and my own schedule. I had certain things to get done, and if it took longer than a day, I got paid overtime for it. It was a high-pressure job in many ways, but not in terms of having thirty people needing your attention immediately and knowing that legally, I’m required to be in the room. As a teacher, if I step out of the room to go to the bathroom and something happens, legally, I’m responsible.

It’s just such a different thing. You feel like a person when you’re working at another job, and you don’t feel like a person when you’re teaching. It feels like being a train. Somebody switches it on, and it’s moving and you had better keep running. You don’t have the option to make a personal choice like “I think I’ll put this off until tomorrow.” There are thirty people, and they need things. You go with it all day.

I guess the equivalent might be if thirty people called me at the same time to tell me their computers crashed. But that’s just impossible. The network could go down and thirty people could call, but there’d be five or six of us in the IT department who would go troubleshoot it and one person would man the phones and say to people, “This is probably what we think is happening, it’ll probably be about fifteen minutes, we’ll let you know.” You work at high speed on it, but it’s not thirty people standing over you wanting immediate attention.

---

Teachers are required by law to stay within their classrooms. They are responsible for anything that happens when a student is in their charge. This is a reasonable requirement, yet because there aren’t reasonable breaks in school schedules, teachers often lack the basic liberties most occupations take for granted.

Few other professionals see thirty or more clients at once, all with different needs, some of whom may be determined to work counter to your goals. The combination of these factors can be stressful, to say the least—especially when there is no possibility, for hours on end, of respite.

pp. 116–118

Most people seem to think that only (2) is the full-time job of teaching, and that (1) and (3) are mere periphery requirements. These people are wrong. I could easily fill a full 40+ hour week doing any one of them, and realistically I spend 20–30+ hours weekly on each, sometimes skimping on one (generally (3), or parts of it) for a week or two and then spending a maddening weekend or taking a sick-day (or both) to catch up.

I would gladly do any one of these jobs—I think I would even enjoy doing any one of them—or alternate between them from semester to semester or year to year. Ideally, if I were doing only one of them and two others were doing the other two, we would work in very close collaboration.

But giving each of the three the attention it ought to get is difficult-bordering-on-impossible, and this is one of the reasons I will not be able to keep doing this job forever.

(Download PDF)

Do Not Interrupt This Class (Sign)

Cleaning the office today I came across the oldest ones. This is the most amusing highlight from the first day of school, August 8, 2005:

This was my best class. A little chattiness from a few, but good overall. Female athlete (whose name I don’t remember) seemed studious and generally wonderful, and said early that, “this seems like it will be a fun class.” It was before the strictness of rules and consequences, but still. She also had to “think of a book” for the information sheet [which asked for favorite book], while no other student mentioned the question and almost all left it blank. She and another girl (special ed? kept spitting into container) wondered where I’m from, the other girl saying I looked like I’m not from this country, the athlete saying I looked like a magician, and a male student saying I look like “a straight P-I-M-P, pimp.” There was some agreement that I must be from Paris (strangely, just like somebody said at Lafayette High during summer school) and a suggestion of England. They were very good w/ row-by-row dismissal, several even staying after to write the homework assignment.

As a school teacher in Mississippi, I heard in every room, in every hallway, a hundred times every day: Shirt-tails, shirt-tails, tuck in your shirt-tails, we will send you home, we will suspend you, shirt-tails. 

Now that I’m a student most of the time, and a part-time tutor in a public high school in Santa Fe, every day it’s: IDs, ID badges, IDs out, get your IDs out, we will send you home, get your IDs out.

If they were lyrics, they’d be sung to the same tune.

Here’s how:

(1) Go to Google Docs. If you don’t have a google account, you’ll have to set one up, but if you already use GMail or GReader or any of the other apps, you just need to log in.

(2) In the upper-left corner, open the New drop-down menu and select Form.

(3) You should now have a blank form. This will be your quiz. Give it a name where it says Untitled form and any additional text that will help your students (your name, class name, instructions, or whatever) in the box beneath it.

(4) Open the selection box for Question Type and select text. Next to Question Title, type “Name:” and check the box that says Make this a required question. (You might want to add a question for class period or ID number, too.  For me, a name was usually sufficient.)

(5) At the top-left of the page, click Add question and select Multiple choice to create the first test question. (You can choose others types of questions, too, of course. I often had a few open-ended paragraph response questions, but these require old-fashioned review and grading.)

(6) Type your question in the box next to Question Title. I recommend numbering it there, too. For example: “1) What is 5+5?” Add some Help Text if you want to (it’ll appear smaller and lighter beneath the question).

(7) Type the first possible response to the question in the Option 1 box. Click add ‘Other’ to add additional options, or just click in the “ghosted” second option to make it appear, and do the same thing again to add as many choices as you want. Be sure to include the correct answer as one and only one option!

(8) At the top-left of the page, click Add question to create the next question. Repeat steps (6) and (7).

(9) Repeat step (8) to make all the questions you want. If you want to change one you’ve already made, hover the mouse over it so that the pencil icon appears to the right, and click on that icon. You can also drag questions up and down to rearrange their order.

(10) When you’re finished, click Done on the active question, and click save on the top-right. If you click on More actions and Edit confirmation, you can edit the message that is displayed after the completed quiz is submitted. (Or you can leave it with the default message.)

(I recommend NOT clicking on any of the radio buttons, because if one is selected when you make the form, it’ll be selected by default for your students (or whomever) on the quiz. If you select one accidentally, make a new answer choice, select its radio button, and then delete it with the x button to its right. Be sure to save.)

(11) You should now have a link to the published form on the bottom of the page. You can copy and paste it into a mass email to your students, or link to it on a school web page (on Google Pages?), or make it more manageable at tinyurl.com and write it on the board. See the example I’m making right now (even take the very easy quiz) over here.

(12) Before any students take the quiz, take it yourself. Enter “ANSWER KEY” (or whatever you like) as your name and all the right answers. Click Submit.

(13) Now go back to Google Docs. You should see your quiz as one of your saved documents. Click on it and you’ll find all responses in a spreadsheet. The date and time of each response is stamped in column A (so you can have deadlines if you want them, and students can’t fake it), names in column B, and all of your questions in subsequent columns. (See what I mean in this example.)

(Once the deadline passes, if you don’t want to accept late submissions, you can click on More actions and select Stop accepting responses.)

(14) All the way on the left, where rows are numbered, between 1 and 2, you should see a gray rectangle. Click on it, and drag it down until it’s between 2 and 3. You should now be able to scroll down over all your students’ responses while the questions and the correct answers remain visible on the top for easy comparison.

(15) There should be a similar gray rectangle to the left of the A above the first column.  Click it and drag it to the right until it’s between the B and the C. You should now be able to scroll left and right through all of your students’ responses and still see the time of submission and the student names to the left.

Now, if you want Google to do all the grading for you (and of course you do), it gets slightly trickier. But it’s not too hard, and after you’ve done it once, it’s easy.

(16) Once a student has submitted their responses, click on the cell in the same row as their responses but to the right of the last one.  So, for instance, since the last question of my sample quiz is in column D, and my first student response is in row 3, I’m clicking on cell E3 (same row as the student, next column to the right after the last question).

(17) In the cell, enter a formula like this one: =arrayformula(sum(C$2:D$2=C3:D3))

Yours will be a little different from this one. The = sign indicates that what follows is a formula. The arrayformula() function indicates that whatever is wrapped inside its parentheses will have array inputs; the sum() function takes a sum of the arguments in its parentheses (or in this case, the number that return “true”); and the last stuff is the array that we’re actually counting.  

If none of that made sense, don’t worry. This is what you need to know: the C$2:D$2 means that the correct answers are in the cells between and including C2 and D2. If your quiz has many more questions, and the answers go from C2 and ZZ2 (or whatever), you’ll need to change that part of the formula to C$2:ZZ$2. Don’t forget the dollar signs! (They’ll be explained below.)

The C3:D3 means that the answers of the student whose answers are in this row are in the cells between and including C3 and D3. You’ll want to make these letters match the letters you used in the previous paragraph, since if the answers go from C to ZZ for the correct answer row, they should for the student, too. You’ll want the numbers to be one higher than what you used in the previous paragraph, since this student’s answers will be one row beneath the correct answers. Make sure you don’t have the dollar signs here!

So the formula sum(C$2:D$2=C3:D3) is asking how many cells between C2 and D2 are equal to the corresponding cells between C3 and D3. (We need to wrap all this in the arrayformula() function since these ranges of cells make up array data.)

If you don’t understand or care about any of this, just enter “=arrayformula(sum(X$#:Y$#=X@:Y@))” (without quotation marks) in the cell, replacing X with the column letter of the first correct answer, Y with the column letter of the last correct answer, # with the number of the row with the correct answers, and @ with the number of the row with the first student’s answers (probably one greater than the number of the row with the correct answers).

(18) Now, once you’ve entered that formula and hit enter, the cell should have the total number of that student’s answers that match the correct answers. When that cell is highlighted, there should be a little blue square in its lower-right corner.  Once all the students have submitted their answers, click on that square and drag it down to the last student’s row. This will copy the formula you entered into each row. (And since we had the $-sign in C$2 and D$2 (or wherever the answers were), those cell locations will be unchanged in all the new formulae; since we didn’t have the $-sign in C3 and D3 (or wherever the first student’s answers were), those cell locations will automatically increment for each row.)

(Unfortunately, you do have to wait for students to submit the answers before you drag these formulae down. If you drag them down into blank rows, the form will recognize that those rows are already in use and subsequent submissions will skip them.)

(19) If you want Google Docs to automatically calculate percentages, click on the cell to the right of the first student’s “total correct” cell (in other words, to the right of the one we just added a formula to). Enter an = sign, click on the student’s “total correct” cell, enter a / sign, and enter the total number of questions. So it should look something like this: =E3/2 . This divides the student’s number of total correct answers by the number of possible correct answers. When you hit enter, the cell will have a 1 if the student got 100%, a 0 if the student got a 0%, and a decimal for anything in between. If you click the Edit tab, and, while the cell is highlighted, click the Format drop-down menu, and then select one of the percentage options, the cell will be displayed as a standard percentage. You can do the drag-down procedure as before to copy this formula for all the other students as well.

It should look something like my example here. Once you know how to do this, it can save an enormous amount of time. I kept a blog for each class period, and posted the agenda and assignments every day. I would sometimes make a “take home quiz” like this and post the link. Other times, when I was required to give a multiple choice test at school, I would make it like this and administer it in the library or computer lab. And, of course, this same method can be easily modified for regular gathering of contact information on the first day of school (bonus: student email addresses will be copy-and-pastable), for learning-style inventories, for parent surveys, or just about anything else.

And I saved all that time for grading essays!

So I’ve compiled quite a collection of my favorite student haiku.  The organization of my papers and miscellanea is still suffering from the recent move, but I will try to post at least the highlights here eventually.

But for now, something related and different: since I was reading hundreds of haiku most every week, I had haiku on the brain, and it started to spread.  Sometimes — always, I admit, in meetings and classes — friends and I would write collaborative haiku, one person writing a line and passing it on, the other writing a line and returning it for a resolution.  What follows are the haiku that Molina and I wrote in this fashion while compulsorily attending the Jackson Public Schools “convocation” for teachers and administrators in the gymnasium of Jackson State University in August of 2006.  Most of them pertain to what was being said or done by the speaker or presenter in the moment they were written.  A few of them might make more sense if you have some familiarity with the particular wasteland that is professional pedagogical theory, or if you know some of our friends.

So many speeches

And yet so little is said

I pledge to the flag

Ten teams, three tigers

Grambling’s view of the pine bluff

Putting shine on shit

Graves for the justice

Not to mention for reason

Listen forever

How much bullshit fits?

As long as you tickle them

It goes easier

I have a goatee

You do, too: goatees for all!

What would Jacob think?

Orange tie, power

How  can I find his tailor?

The clothes make the man

[After some comment about church]

Yep, I’m a heathen

Heathenism sure is fun

Let’s go eat some pie

[After a (black) speaker made a joke about white people not sending their kids to the public schools, and the (mostly black, but also white) audience laughed]

Laugh at racism

Just refrain from eye contact

It can be fun, too

Let’s get on the bus

That’s not a euphemism

Like your mom’s euphemism

[During performance of The Battle Hymn of the Republic]

We love our Jesus

Who needs an eternal soul?

Can truth even march?

Take it from the top:

Jesus is a good buddy

Bad taste in music

Whose truth is marching?

Whoever sings the loudest

Loudness equals truth

Teacher discount, please

Can discount refer to time?

Just keep your receipts

Teachers pat own backs

Student achievement today

We love each other

Neither good nor great

At least we’ve been entertained

What good teachers do

Learning is free lunch

But there’s no such thing as that

Just keep your receipts

School starts on Monday

It continues Tuesday

Same shit, different day

What is he saying?

What is truth, Pontius Pilate?

What isn’t truth, man?

My truth is bigger

Doc says I’m a late bloomer

It lasts longer, too

Eat my doctorate

It’s Doctor Asshole to you.

Want to play doctor?

[Name expunged] plays doctor

[Name expunged] has his own office

Pee-aitch-deed your mom

What follows is a list of wikipedia articles that were vandalized by Jim Hill High School students (or teachers, I guess) between May of 2007 and May of 2008:

• Alpha Kappa Alpha
• Grind with Me
• Talk:Kelly Ingram Park
• Honduras
• Civil Rights Movement
• Provine High School
• Physician
• Facebook
• Komodo dragon
• Digital piano
• My Dog Skip
• Talk:Ben Carson
• Ben Carson
• Provine High School
• Sam Walton
• Ben Carson
• Amber
• World
• Chesapeake High School, Baltimore
• Tyler Perry’s House of Payne

This subject came up yesterday. This morning, in the middle of final exams, the fire alarm went off, I instructed my students to leave their tests on their desks, and we marched outside. From the field, at 9:36, I tweeted:

middle of the exam, fire alarm, fire trucks, chaos. Recess on the field. Kids fighting.

Some time later (after we returned to class and resumed testing — before my administration had communicated to faculty what had happened) I saw that Ben had tweeted a reference to the Clarion Ledger, which, at 10:05, had posted maybe 100 words, including a quotation from the fire investigator.

I don’t doubt that in the 30 or 35 minutes from fire alarm to Clarion Ledger posting, people at the newspaper received more word than just mine; but mine was available to them, and they were allegedly listening.

It occurs to me in light of this that school districts will inevitably attempt to forbid the use of cellphones by teachers, and other nervous or inept employers will do likewise, and it may ultimately be part of a first amendment decision.