10 Things They Should Teach You in Teacher Training But Totally Don’t

Saturday, October 24, 2015



This week I had a bad day at my new school. I was embarrassed because I wasn’t following a certain grading policy I didn’t know was there (which is my fault for not having read the district handbook closely). I cried at school, which is always a terribly feeling. Then, when I got in my car, as if I activated some magic switch with my butt, I realized these things:
  •  During the last five years, I never once made it until late October without crying. In fact, in past years, I would have cried several times by now from school-related frustration.
  •   The administrator who pointed it out to me was so unbelievably kind. She took full responsibility (even though she shouldn’t have) for not reminding me, and she followed it up with like five minutes about how much students and parents love me and how much she values me.
  •  This “bad day” was nothing near like what my bad days used to be like, when something would break me that was out of my control.
  •   Even at the end of this “bad day,” I still felt happy, valued, and hopeful. I never felt that on my bad days before.

And then I went home and went to the gym, which I also wouldn't have done before (or, let's be real, even on my good days before).

In many ways I feel like it’s my first year all over again at my new school, but with nowhere near the level or kind of negative feelings I experienced before. Which got me thinking:

Why back then did I have to learn so many things on my own?

It's partly because I didn’t major in education in college. I majored in English because all my teachers from K-12 said FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS! THE WORLD IS YOUR OYSTER! YOU CAN DO ANYTHING YOU PUT YOUR MIND TO!, and I wanted to be a writer, so I majored in English. I knew all I needed to do was graduate and start cranking out bestsellers and live off the profit from all the movies and theme parks based on my novels!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Hahaha. Ahahaha. Haha. Ha.

(That didn’t happen.)

I ended up getting my alternative certification through a program in my area. Apparently, as alt-cert programs go it was one of the more reputable ones (there are programs that give out teaching certification in as little as 6 weeks), but even so, my first year felt like a complete and total learning curve.  

I’ve heard it said that nothing can prepare you for teaching except for teaching, but I don’t think that’s true. Here are some of the things I really needed to know that the teaching books left out that would have made my first few years not entirely un-horrible, but a little less horrible.

1. How to perform copier machine surgery. I will estimate that approximately 50% of my tears during my first year were due to the copier jamming and me not being able to fix it. I can’t tell you how many total hours I wasted trying to fix jams or trekking over to another part of the school to find a non-jammed copier. Now, I’m like Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman or Cesar Milan with the copy machine. “Yeah, I think it doesn’t like Tray 1,” I found myself saying to a newbie the other day, as if it were a wild mustang I was taming.

2. Expo Marker Management. Store them upright, cap-end down. Game-changer.

3. What to do when your administration is the worst. I remember reading a chapter in a professional development book about conflict with the administration. Looking back, the examples in the book were laughable, like what to say if the principal wanted to trim the budget for a club you sponsor or get rid of the bulletin board outside your door. Did the writers of these books teach in Disneyland or something?
Where was my class on what to do when your principal tells you to forge application essays for an Ivy League principal program for her? Or when your assistant principal threatens your colleagues and students on a regular basis? Or when your principal refers to the history department as “a bunch of skinny white bitches” in an unintentionally forwarded email and goes on to win district awards for outstanding leadership? When your principal is best friends with her boss, so there’s actually nothing you can do?
I think I’ve toughened up enough since then that I would be better at handling those administrators than I was my first two years. But still, a course in What To Do When Your Administration is the Worst should be requisite for teacher training.

4. How to give a serious, stern talk without beginning to ramble, stumble, or spout nonsense. The worst is when a colleague or administrator walks up while you’re giving a serious talk and you mess up just a little part, which then makes you hyperaware of the fact that you’re speaking words, and then you find yourself talking about a documentary about an Irish mafia leader.

5. De-escalation techniques.

Teacher training: Here’s a tiny chapter on how to deal with a student who is disrespectful or even (*gasp*) refuses to do work.

Reality: Here, deal with this student who is crossing the room to literally rip out the hair of another student. Oh, and you can’t send the student to the office because your administration said nobody was allowed to write an office referral for the rest of the year. And students aren’t allowed to leave your class. Good luck!

6. Medical care. No Band-Aids unless you’re bleeding, the nurse can’t fix your headache, if your stomach still hurts in 15 minutes let me know, OR you can go to the nurse, but after you’ve turned in your test.

7. How to teach a class of 30 in which half of your students are Special Ed or Emotionally Disturbed, you have no co-teacher, and an administrator who expects you to advance all students 2-3 grade levels in 9 months.

Still beats me.

8. What DEVOLSON is and how to cope with it. If I’d known about the Dark, Evil Vortex of Late September, October, and November before I started teaching, it might not have been easier, but having a diagnosis would have made life way more manageable.

9. How to redo an entire lesson plan in your head and on the spot. In teacher training, they made it sound like you might have to modify part of a lesson as you’re teaching it if you see it’s not working. But what about when your school’s electricity goes off in the middle of class and you’re given specific instructions over the intercom to keep teaching? Or when you realize on book preview day that ALL the students have read the novel you just spent five weeks planning? Or when you reserve the one computer cart for 75 classrooms in your school and find that none of the laptops are charged, or that another teacher took the laptops and TOTALLY DIDN’T EVEN USE THE GOOGLE DOC TO RESERVE IT.

Sorry. Touchy subject.

It took me years to be able to quickly transition over to a new activity confidently and without a student saying, “Uh, did you just make that up right now?”

10. Managing your budget on a teacher salary while having a savings account with actual dollars in it.  Um. I still need someone to teach me this.


When I start my Love Teach Teacher Training Program To Teach Teachers How To Teach Good And To Do Other Stuff Good Too, all of these will be courses. Or maybe we should crowd-source-write a book or something (but only if it could be made into a theme park).

What have you learned from teaching that your teacher training could have never prepared you for?*

Love,

Teach


*What’s the grammatically correct version of this sentence? “For what could your teaching training have never prepared you?” Dumb. Can we just agree to dangle certain prepositions?

Why Don't I Matter to You, Congress?: A Plea from a Teacher

Sunday, October 4, 2015



A few years ago I was in a meeting before school when one of our clerks came in and told us that the police just called. We needed to immediately go into lockdown because a man who had been shooting randomly in the apartments across the street had been seen running onto our campus.

I had been worried about this kind of day. Columbine happened when I was in elementary school, but plenty of other mass shootings had taken place after I started teaching (Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, etc.). Every time I heard about another school shooting I wondered what kind of teacher would I be in that situation. Would I bravely and selflessly put myself in the line of fire to save a child? Or would I panic and freeze under pressure? I scared myself just thinking about it.

People are quick to say what they would and wouldn’t do in an emergency or tense situation. I’ve heard so many people give confident answers about how they would react heroically in a life-threatening circumstance, and I’ve always wondered how they could be so sure. I think I’m generally a good person, but if I’ve learned anything being on this planet, I’ve learned that you can never know how you will think, feel, or react in a situation until you are there.

That day a few years ago, I was there.


Eerily, almost robotically, the other teachers and I got up and walked briskly but calmly just as our principal came on the intercom. In a controlled but clearly tense voice he announced we were on lockdown and told us to grab any students in the hallway that we could and usher them into our rooms.

I don’t even remember getting to my room, but when I did I had about twenty kids following me in as I locked the door from the outside. When I could see the hallway was clear, I went inside and turned off the lights. Students were asking questions nervously, but I told them everything was going to be fine and that they had to stay quiet. I happened to have my desks stacked on top of each other in a corner of the room for a class activity that day and told the kids to sit behind them, which was of sight from the classroom window. They did so quickly and silently, to my surprise. As noiselessly as I could, I slid a few desks onto their sides and up against the door so that they were barricading it shut but not able to be seen from the window at the door. My reasoning was that if someone were to break down the door, they could at least be deterred for a few more moments. I crouched on the hinge side of the door, between the door barricade I’d made and my students.

Once I was still, I could think again. I was surprised how easy it was to think. Except for my heart beating at full volume in my ears, I was completely calm and lucid.

Our prior training for a school shooting only went as far as turning off lights, locking doors, and hiding, but I reasoned that if the shooter actually made it into my room, it would not take them long to find my students. The only hope of stopping something from happening would be for me to act fast. I was at the perfect angle from my crouching position to tackle from the knees—the report had said the shooter was alone, so I knew my chances wouldn’t be great, but would be better than if there were more than one attacker.

For another minute or so, everything was silent. And then I could hear boots—a single pair—outside our building heading into our wing. I held my breath. I could hear a few students whimpering. Mine was the first door on the right after walking inside. If an attacker were to enter, my room would surely be the first target.

The footsteps came closer and were heavy but purposeful, a gait almost at a jog. I was afraid, but still strangely calm. I was made of adrenaline. Not the jumpy, scary-movie kind. A weird adrenaline that made me feel at once alert and perfectly still.

I watched the handle on the inside of my door jerk up and down. He was trying the door.

I’m ready to die, I thought. I felt a hundred things—regret, anticipation, certainty, uncertainty, courage, fear. I waited to hear a gunshot, a boot kicking down the door, something.

But then I heard the boot steps moving down the hall. I heard the other doors being tried. And then I heard them leave.
           
It wasn’t until later that day that I found out the footsteps I heard belonged to someone in a SWAT unit doing a sweep of the building. Why they didn’t announce who they were, I still have no idea.

Our school was in lockdown for around an hour before we were given the all clear. Evidently the shooter had run towards our school but never actually onto school property. He was caught minutes later in a neighboring apartment complex.

***

This wasn’t the first non-drill lockdown I’ve been in, and I know it won’t be the last. But this was the first lockdown where I felt almost certain of my own death at the hands of someone with a gun.

The good news is that I know I'm much braver than I thought I was. (And since I can’t even handle haunted houses, chances are you are much braver than you think, too.) I know that I can count on that weird adrenaline to take over and think for me when I'm in a situation like that.

The bad news is that I might actually be gunned down one day. School shootings are now common. 

This week, after hearing about Umpqua, I questioned whether I want to teach anymore, and not for the first time. The number of firearm-related deaths, whether mass shootings or not, in the past decade combined with Congress’s refusal to enact stricter gun laws indicates to me that the trend in America of mass shootings is only going to grow.
            
There are so many problems facing teachers and students in our country’s educational system, and I haven’t stayed silent about them on this blog. But for the first time I’m realizing exactly how much I’m up against. It’s a much larger beast than I thought. But for now, I will continue to find an answer to the question I’ve been pondering this week, which is really the question at the heart of every issue that has bothered me since I began teaching:
           
Why don’t I matter to you, Congress?

I hope I never die in a school shooting, or a shooting at a movie theater, or in a place of worship, or on a street corner. But if I do, let my death be on the consciences of those who learn about mass shootings, have the legislative power to do something about it, and look the other way.

Love,

Teach
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