Teacher Anxiety

Image from Wikimedia Commons by GRPH3B18

The school year has started and I have been placed for student teaching.  In order to absorb the school culture I have been attending the staff meetings along with the other student teachers.  The nice thing about attending the meetings, besides getting a chance to meet the teachers, was that I got to see what practical, outside-the-classroom issues teachers were most anxious about.  Teacher seemed to be very concerned about issues in the following categories.

1. Rigid standards (I should note that they were overjoyed to see the newer test questions that are going to be implemented in the next few years, so this is not an issue of laziness).

2. Budget issues came up several times, teachers feel education is inadequately funded.  I have always felt that education was just inefficiently funded.  For example, buying every student a netbook and digital resources is cheaper than supplying textbooks, lets them take tests digitally so less paper is consumed and districts have strict regulations on where teachers purchase their supplies so they often cannot purchase things for the best deals they can find.

3. "The District."  Teachers see this as a powerful entity above them.  "Will the district approve?" is a great concern for them.  They also seem to fear that they will be in a situation where the district has some bureaucratic rule that will inhibit them from helping their students.

It is good to get a preview of the kinds of issues I will be dealing with in education.  I was already aware of the classroom and political concerns from my classes and the fact that these concerns are more popular.  These other ones that are not written about in news articles but still extremely relevant to the job of teaching are going to be important to know.

Do We Really Want Teachers Who Are Leaders?

Narcissists are sought after for leaders and they also make terrible leaders.  In general people are attracted to leaders who display confidence, such leaders fear others subverting their status, so they choose underlings who are non-threatening.  What implications could this have for teaching?


We do want teachers to be good leaders.  They have to control 30 students who often times have many other places they would rather be than school.  But we do not want narcissistic teachers (the kinds of people others see as leaders) because of the negative affect it could have on students.  Essentially the narcissistic teachers who get hired for their leadership potential could be shooting down students when they feel threatened by their potential status.  It sounds axiomatic that good teachers are good leaders, but maybe that is not what we want for schools.

RSA Animate: Do Grades Motivate?

I have a lot of memories from school of teachers dangling extra credit points as bait to get students to do what they want.  Grades are very important to many students.  In tenth grade my Algebra 2/Trig teacher offered extra credit points for anyone who could explain how a student in class was cheating (she did not mention a name and told them they did not have to give her a name).  Half of the class told her not only how the cheating worked but who was involved.  "You guys would step on your own mother's backs for extra credit" she would say.  Though she had no place to criticize, she capitalized off of that tendency in college track students.  This was in a magnet program designed to get students into as many AP classes as possible and that would every year send some students out to ivy league schools.  If class were Foundations of Math would she get the same response?  How effective are grades at motivating average students or students whose performance is below average?


Another question to ask is about how good grades are at getting the best work out of students.  Students may bring in a relevant newspaper article or sell out their friend for extra credit points.  But do grades motivate students to really think about the material?  Can the incentive of good grades promote first order thinking about the subject matter?


I do not know if there are studies done on grades' abilities in this area.  I will have to keep my eyes out for one (if anyone still reads this and you know of any data here feel free to comment).  I did, however, find this RSA Animate interesting.  This is what got me interested in thinking about grades and if they motivate students the way teachers would want them to.

If financial incentives help mechanical tasks but not cognitive tasks what can that tell us about grades' ability to help motivate students to learn?  We can use points that contribute to grades to get kids to sell out their friends.  We could classify that as a mechanical task.  It is different than figuring out who is cheating and how, we assume the students already know that, so the task is analogous to pulling a lever because it is simply a matter of providing the teacher with the requested information.  UCSB's construcivist philosophy of education is far too sophisticated to see learning as anything but a cognitive task.  The first order learning that we especially want to provide middle and high school students with will require more than grades to motivate them.  The question becomes this: how do we give students the features than Dan Pink says are motivating to get them to learn the subject matter?

Healthy Teachers

As a single subject: history student I got a letter from my professor telling me the score for the next month or so.  In the letter he recommended building a habit of waking up early and working out to keep your energy levels up (that always seemed counter-intuitive to me.  Wake up early, work out and have more energy?) for when I start student teaching.  I already to a fair amount of working out (running, medicine-ball, body weight, stretch chords) but usually at night.  Night is a much better time for me because I am much looser then, in the morning my muscles are very tense.  The times I have gone running in the morning my legs feel like they have rubber bands attached to them.  Aerobic workouts are hard to do early on because of this tenseness.  I decided to build an early morning routine (I had it in high school from 6 am waterpolo and 5:15 swim, but lost it afterwards) around weight-lifting and swimming to take advantage of UCSB’s impressive rec center.

Going to a weight room is a strange social experience, especially if you have not been in one in five years.  Not only am I rusty at the lifting exercises (my squat is too embarrassing to mention!) but I am also rusty at the weight room etiquette.  How close are you allowed to get to people doing free weights?  Can you take barbells off of some equipment to use for other lifts if you cannot find one elsewhere?  And apparently no one wipes down their machine (a courtesy that the lifting websites I visited for workout ideas said was a big deal).

Another awkward thing about the weight room is the differing levels of weight training ability.  I do not consider myself a serious lifter; I am just putting in some time increasing the maximum force my muscles can generate because I think I am reaching the limit of what my body workouts can get me.  In the weight room, however, there are a lot of guys who are very into it.  They do curls with weights I would have trouble benching.  I tend to start things out casually and then dive in when I have something to compare myself to.  I started running 3 miles a week after college just to get a little sweaty and in two years started marathon training when my friend got into running too.  Am I going to end up diving in to this?  Imagine being a kid walking into class on the first day and seeing his teacher with biceps as big as his waist.

Are you having trouble imagining?  This may help.

It's probably a tumor.

I also do not like the feeling that I am losing something.  People have found that martial arts experts who harden the bones in their hands to punch have softer skulls than non-martial artists.  It is possible that bone hardness is a zero-sum game and if you build it in one spot you lose it in another.  I have worked hard to be a flexible, fast-twitch, quick moving sort of athlete, not a power lifter or anything like that.  Is there a zero-sum game involved in agility and strength?  Will I have to give up my tree-climbing if I get into weight lifting?  Can I bring myself to casually participate in the weight room culture and not get completely sucked in?

Helicopters Are Noisy

Lenore Skenazy is a reporter for The New York Sun who gained notoriety among her friends for letting her 9 year old son ride the subway by himself.  She is part of a movement of parents that is reacting to what is perceived as overactive parenting that developed in the 1990s.  What people like Lenore are concerned with is that "helicopter" parenting (named because parents, so fearful for their child's safety, hover around them) is convincing children that everything is dangerous.  From a teaching perspective (or at least a Jules Henry perspective) the noise of helicopter parenting is creating a society of distrustful wimps.  Children see danger everywhere because their parents scare them with warnings.  They are taught that every stranger is a kidnapper and everything must be done with adult supervision.  This experience also stifles their imagination, their ability to explore and the development of independence.


Lenore blogs about the responses she gets to her parenting style:

People who want me arrested for child abuse were sure that my son had dodged drug dealers, bullies, child molesters and psychopaths on that afternoon subway ride home by himself.

Believe me, if I lived in a city like that, I’d evacuate. But crime wise, New York City is actually on par with Provo, Utah — very safe.

Not that facts make any difference. Somehow, a whole lot of parents are just convinced that nothing outside the home is safe. At the same time, they’re also convinced that their children are helpless to fend for themselves. While most of these parents walked to school as kids, or hiked the woods — or even took public transportation — they can’t imagine their own offspring doing the same thing.

  Lenore believes that there are consequences to being too protective of children.  In her own words:

Children, like chickens, deserve a life outside the cage. The overprotected life is stunting and stifling, not to mention boring for all concerned.

If learning is about exploration and independence, helicopter parenting is inhibiting a child's ability to learn.  Without the ability to take risks or be away from his parents how is a child going to learn to try things on his own?  When teaching Sunday school some students were very independent (unfortunately too independent and they would get in trouble when trying to climb a tree to get a ball down) and others would need me to tell them what to do all the time.  Those in a leadership role are tempted to reward the dependents because they make you feel more in control of the group.  But the question is, which one of those students is better equipped for exploratory learning?

Course Reflection for Language and Culture Class

I have completed my first round of courses in TEP at UCSB and was asked to write a reflection on my Language and Culture in Education course.  Here it is...

Course Reflection

There are times when it is very easy to teach dry facts. If you have motivated, mature adults whose career aspirations depend on them memorizing facts all you have to do is say them and watch as they furiously write down notes on their laptops. Unfortunately teaching facts seems to be inadequate for making successful teachers (and from my foundations of education class it seems like that is true for most learning outside of learning to teach) and a lecture format of educating teachers probably breaks a cardinal rule of teacher education; do not teach your students in a way you do not want them to teach their students. In the early days of taking both the culture and language class and the foundations of education class I was getting frustrated because when I went home at the end of the day I did not feel like I had learned anything new. I like to debrief myself before going to bed and go over events of the day. During the early stages of the class I would get disappointed that I did not have more facts to replay in my mental repertoire. Unlike a lot of children who are in school because they are supposed to or in college because it is a hoop they feel they have to jump through I have no problem sitting through lectures to memorize facts and procedures. It took me a little while to realize that learning was not just about memorization of facts or procedures. The type of learning in these early stages of TEP seems to be to change the way I think. While this type of learning is beneficial to creating successful teachers it is a challenge to find exactly what classroom activities and assignments were the most effective.

One question I had hoped to get answered was how to teach different cultures, as if the class was going to be spent analyzing the different cultures represented in California schools and having us practice teaching them. Perhaps Anissa would have us role-play teaching a class of 25% Samoan, 50% Hispanic, 15% Caucasian and 10% other. We would then get a rubric back from her when we were done that scored us on buzzwords like “cultural compassion” and “inclusiveness.” We would have to make sure our content was properly divided proportionally by percent into items that are intended to reach each different culture. That means that my grade would go down if 25% of my content was not designed to appeal to Samoan students.

Perhaps I will change my mind about this after more classes, but right now I doubt anyone knows the best procedure for teaching a multicultural classroom; nor am I convinced that such a procedure exists as nice as it would be if it did. To be a better teacher who understands the role of language and culture in education we must learn to think in a way that takes language and culture into consideration in how we assess our classrooms. We now have practice analyzing our classroom culture and rationales for being sensitive to the cultures our students come from. That way we become teachers who are equipped to develop our own methods of being culturally responsive and responsible educators.

We worked to accomplish this mostly through observation and discussion. By observation I mean we observe examples of classrooms either first hand, on film or through written descriptions. We then discuss these observations with each other in order to get ideas of how to handle situations we may have to that are similar to what we observed. We were not alone in this. Anissa helped push us in certain directions when we needed it, also our readings often included commentary with the observations that suggested their own solutions to the problems recorded.

The most useful reading we did was probably “I Won't Learn From You” by Kohl. While doing my pre-professional teaching I had a tutorial period for students who were failing their classes. I remember there was one student who would rather stare at the wall than do homework. Every morning he would just sit and do nothing (I would have found it more entertaining to work on my homework) for one hour during homework tutoring. This was obviously a situation of active non-learning. There was something about giving in to the demands of a teacher or doing assignments that he felt threatened by to the point where he would choose intentional boredom over doing any work on assignments. While our class did not give me a step-by-step procedure for convincing this person to do homework it helped me learn to classify what was going on so that I know what to work on for a solution. Instead of asking myself “what's this kid's problem?” I can ask myself “what has engaged this student in active non-learning and how can I address it?” While the difference between those responses seems slight the outcomes have drastically different potentials. The former response is likely to alienate the student and cause him to dig deeper into his immutable trench. The latter may help me find a way to work around the barrier between the lesson and the student's desire to learn.

In a similar vein, discussing contemporary issues in education helped us learn to think clearly about these issues. Though it did not give us definitive answers it helped us learn the concerns behind the issues and to consider the different responses people would have to them. Probably the most effective way to accomplish this (and with minimal bloodshed) was to assign us a position to debate. While there is a chance that the issue one of us received was one we had done a lot of research and thinking on and the position we received was one we are passionate about in general this forced students to attempt to see things from a point of view that was not their own (even if they had no opinion, they had to argue as if they did have an opinion so it was still a point of view that was not their own).

If I had to choose a tangible artifact that showed my progress in this class I would have to say that the blog I started for the class is it (teachingsmarts.blogspot.com). I had intended to start a teaching blog anyway because it is a hobby I had been meaning to get into. I spent five years between undergrad and TEP and my writing ability had declined significantly and I wanted to start a blog on a topic that I would want to write about a lot. I had tried other blogs (a personal blog and a theology blog) before but would not update them very often. It turns out that the level of writing for a personal blog tends to get too informal for what I was trying to accomplish and I do not have nearly as much to say about theology as I thought I did. The education blog, however, allowed me to continue discussions with fellow students outside of class (and form the comfort of my own home). I also could make posts on my own that helped me work out primitive thoughts I had into something comprehensive, reflect on something I heard or read outside of class and try to apply it to what I was learning or just post an idea I had in class that we did not get around to discussing. I can in to the program with a strong opinion about what education was and how it worked. With my own areas of idealism and cynicism. The blog has helped me work some of those out with the topics we have been discussing in class. I am seriously considering using it (or something like it) when I am a teacher. To be honest, not a lot has changed, but I am more confident that my way of thinking is not misguided and that, while I have not had a paradigm shift, I have had a shift in how I think about education (I mentioned one big example at the beginning where I think that learning to teach does not involve memorizing procedures). Because I have found the blog so useful I intend to keep updating it (I considered this earlier and have been trying not to make my posts look like class assignments).

Though I did expand my way of thinking in our class there are still some questions I have. I am not convinced that simply altering historical meta-narratives taught in class is enough to break students out of active non-learning. I would like to discuss other methods of convincing students that participating in class is in their best interest. I would also like to further discuss the consequences of certain features of classroom cultures. While the topic was touched on more time was spent discussing the more serious issues we ended up debating. Still, while it seems outside of the intention of the program to tell us what kind of classroom culture we should foster I would like to hear views on what some results of different classroom culture styles are.

Cultural Noise

Reading Jules Henry is an eye-opening experience for those studying to be teachers.  You realize that you have to worry about how your classroom setup, demeanor and tone of voice educates your students when you feel like a lesson plan is really enough to worry about.  The nice thing about classroom noise is that while it cannot be completely controlled it is within the teacher's circle of influence (see the chart on my previous post) because it occurs within the classroom.  While studying language and culture we have, as a class, had to confront the notion of cultural noise.  What have students been taught by their culture and how does it affect the classroom?  There are two differences between the noise in the classroom and the student's cultural noise that make it harder to deal with.  It is in the circle of concern, the one that affects the student's learning experience but cannot be controlled or influenced by the teacher.  It is also different for each student.  All of the teacher's students are in the classroom together and are therefore affected by the same noise.  The students are not all taught by the same cultural noise.  A teacher can keep up with examining the noise of one classroom, the noise of the dozens of cultures represented by the students is a different matter.


How do teachers deal with the cultural noise that affects their students?  Because they cannot change it they can only be aware of it and try to work with it.  Students must be aware of the different cultures represented in their classrooms, respectful enough of the cultures to get to know them well and affirming enough of their students' cultures so the noise does not become dissonant.  Herbert Kohl noted instances of this where students were refusing to learn because they felt that the teacher was out of touch with their culture and disrespectful of it.  They tuned out as part of their defense mode.


This respect for and interest in culture is a practical step in creating a successful learning environment for students but is not necessarily a moral philosophy.  Teachers are not required to see everything that every culture does as good.  In fact, most people can find things in their own culture and others that they find immoral.  Hopefully teachers can see respecting other cultures, even the ones with practices they find immoral, as a greater good because it aids the teaching process.  Teachers cannot change their students' cultures, so even if they do not like them it is outside their circle of influence, so the only response, if they are still interested in teaching the students, is to take the steps necessary to learn about their culture and adjust their teaching strategy accordingly.