Reading this wonderful ethnography, First Year Out, and I’m struck by how surprised the author is by the student’s willingness to share their lives and world views with him.

My experience is that high school and college students are desperate for an adult to ask about their ideas, that they’re desperate for a chance to integrate their own ideas with the coursework. Some, perhaps even most, arrive ready to do so, but within a few weeks, it’s back to business as usual.

Every teacher has experienced the sudden electricity when every student in the room is thoroughly engaged. Unfortunately, it usually occurs by accident, when a student or the teacher somehow trips an invisible switch; only the most skilled practitioners can create this sort of engagement on purpose.

I wonder, for all those who teach multiple levels, how your preparation differs based on the composition of the class.

I teach high school students, undergraduates, advanced undergraduates and graduate students. But what I do for each class to prepare is quite similar. The major difference is that I have two or three back-up plans if I’m teaching high school, one or two if I’m dealing with undergrads, and I’m usually confident that my graduate classes will be over-planned.

Cool link here to a list of free music sites. I have used last.fm mostly so I can have album covers on my blog, but there’s some cool sites here.

Three starting points:
1. You must respect your students.
2. You must believe in your students.
3. You must trust your students.
3. Your intentions must be clear.

Five Statements
1. Be fair and consistent…but you don’t need to treat all students the same way.
2. Don’t make threats…but follow through if you do.
3. Discipline isn’t personal…but you are a human being.
4. The culture of the school may trump your efforts…but don’t give up.
5. Your whole class needs to reinforce the academic and “civic” culture of your room…but you can’t force them to do so.

“It feels great, man. It’s been a long time I don’t do something special like that. But I haven’t been right all year long. But when you don’t feel good and you still get hits, that’s when you know you are a bad man.”

John Edwards unveiled his education plan today.

From scratch, he wants to create a new university that will prepare one thousand teachers and offer advice on best practices to other schools of education. He uses Arthur Levine’s love letter to ed schools as justification.

The present rate of attrition will mean that this school will produce 500 teachers who stay more than five years in a tough district. That means that Philly will get five to seven of these folks — hooray.

So I’m teaching this morning — another glorious day at West Philly High — and a kid asks me if I can get to myspace on my computer. I think he assumed that I had a broadband card (I didn’t) because the School District has blocked myspace.com.

It turns out he was using myspace as a file server, as a way of keeping files (including those for my class) and was now unable to download the paper. I think the smart folks downtown and most adults see these “social networks” as counter to the academic mission but here was a kid using it appropriately only to be unable to access his work.

Posed this question to a group of student teachers and got a number of great answers.

The best response:

Students make a highly-qualified teacher.

What knowledge do students have or what skills have they developed or who have they become as a result of being in your classroom?

Alas, how would you begin to measure this?

It’s the title of a wonderful book by Bob Fecho. The opposite also applies — today in class I had a student proclaim “this feels like an English class.” Discussions of writing seem to be limited to “English” class as if writing is not something you should be doing elsewhere.

There are a lot of reasons why students see things this way but it makes me wonder just how much writing high school students are actually doing.

Contrast Rice’s 1893 description of a classroom in New York City:

Another way in which time is saved is by compelling the children to stare fixedly at the source whence the wisdom flows. When the teacher is the source of wisdom, all the children in the room stare fixedly in the direction of the teacher; when a word on the blackboard is the source of wisdom, all eyes stare fixedly at a point on the blackboard.

Now, here is Paul Tough describing a KIPP classroom in New York City:

Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for classroom behavior invented byLevin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track thespeaker with their eyes. When I visited KIPP Academy last month, I was standing with Levin at the front of a music class of about 60 students, listening to him talk, when he suddenly interrupted himself and pointed at
me. ”Do you notice what he’s doing right now?” he asked the class.

They all called out at once, ”Nodding!”

Levin’s contention is that Americans of a certain background learn these methods for taking in information nearly on and employ them instinctively. KIPP students, he says, need to be taught the methods explicitly. And so it is a little unnerving to stand at the front of a KIPP class; every eye is on you. When a student speaks, every head swivels to watch her. To anyone raised in the principles of progressive education, the uniformity
and discipline in KIPP classrooms can be off-putting. But the kids I spoke to said they use the Slant method not because they fear they will be punished otherwise but because it works: it helps them to learn. (They may also like the feeling of having their classmates’ undivided attention when they ask or answer a question.)

When Levin asked the music class to demonstrate the opposite of Slanting — ”Give us the normal school look,” he said — the students, in unison, all started goofing off, staring into space and slouching. Middle-class Americans know intuitively that ”good behavior” is mostly a game with established rules; the KIPP students seemed to be experiencing the pleasure of being let in on a joke.