Miller

All the math you’ll ever need.

Ray’s Arithmetic is your one-stop shop for math at all levels covering all major concepts. Joseph Ray, contemporary of Abraham Lincoln and a math professor at a private preparatory academy in Ohio, taught math like a BOSS for 25 years. From the description:

Ray […] had no use for indolence and sham. He was always delighted to join his students in sports. He knew how to use balls, marbles, tops as concrete illustration to help young children make the transfer from solid objects to abstract figures.
From the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln to that of Teddy Roosevelt few Americans went to school or were taught at home without considerable exposure to either Ray’s arithmetics or McGuffey’s Readers – usually both. Ray and McGuffey challenged students to excellent accomplishment. Their influence on our country has certainly eclipsed Mann’s and rivaled Dewey’s, but education histories, edited by humanists, seldom mention these men.
Ray’s classic Arithmetics are now brought to a new generation which is in search of excellence.
Mott Media

I own physical copies of Ray’s Arithmetic; they are peerless. Sequential, organized, with plenty of practice problems. They’re also charming; multiplication problems in the book are reminiscent of episodes of Little House on the Prairie or the books in the Anne of Green Gables series.

Ray knew his stuff, but he was also, no doubt, a hard-ass. This book is old school. It’s logical, thorough, and no-nonsense, which is why it works. If your kid can stick with Ray, she will be more numerate (math literate) than the average 18-year-old high school graduate.

WAY MORE.

If you have a future engineer, scientist, coder, mathematician or doctor on your hands, use Ray’s Arithmetic and she’ll be well ahead of the curve well before she hits high school.

Having said that, Ray requires grit.

If you have a kid who is harder to pin down or less confident in her math abilities, I would still start with Ray, but limit the work to one lesson a day. Give your kid the gift of sneaky learning through Prodigy, a free game-based math support program.

If your child is (or you are — if, say, you’re a high schooler trying to keep up with school in the absence of actual in-class instruction) struggling with a math concept, you may want to consult Khan Academy for ideas on how to help them.

And if you are an advanced math learner, one of the most powerful things you can do to show you know a concept if to use Feynman’s technique to nail it down fully in your own head (and maybe help a younger sibling/friend in the process.)

Learning in the Time of Corona

This is going to be brief because, frankly, I’m tired, but I need to talk to you about a rarely recognized fact.

Learning is an activity unto itself. We all know we can learn without another human physically present (although another human’s ideas must be). No one expects Euripides to footnote his play so that students can be fed the nuances of Medea’s character development piecemeal. No one criticizes Mozart for not breaking every composition into tiny, playable chunks for a novice. If you’re tackling Euripides, or Mozart, or Hume, or Pythagoras, YOU are tackling them; the onus is on you to make meaning of their work.

Teaching is trickier. There’s an expectation that the teacher will make everyone understand everything, that a teacher should be good enough that her words alone get across all the essential components of the learning.

Students expect a teacher to control their learning. (If only that was possible.)

What they fail to see is that their job is to do something too: learn the material.

I understand why students feel this way. On a macro level, we’ve taken away their agency, so why should they accept responsibility? At a micro level, teachers too often fail to provide appropriate, scaffolded, rigorous learning opportunities leading to meaningful assessment. There’s far too much lecture to notes to study guide to multiple choice test. There’s far too little mastery of content or skills.

We have a rare opportunity to actually learn the things we want to learn, without bells. Without anyone telling us how to do it.

Falling down the YouTube rabbit hole doesn’t count.

A million worksheets won’t do it.

Binge-watching documentaries won’t mean anything.

Unless.

I’m begging you: process the information or it isn’t learning. Help your kids or younger siblings or friends process theirs.

I’ll offer some structures that can help you.

But, at the end of the day, you have to do the work.

Kids CAN teach themselves at home: Feynman’s Technique, a Learning Process for ANYTHING

It’s been a week since most of the major metro school systems have shut down. If you’re freaking out because you think your kids are missing out on valuable learning, here we go.

Bottom line: if I can teach 40 kids at a time, you can handle one, especially the one that you love. And it doesn’t take 6 hours a day — they can learn more at home in two hours (although you may need them off your back for six).

I’d like to introduce the Feynman technique as the answer to the question: how the Sam Hill am I going to keep these kids learning without a teacher, four walls, and locks on all the doors?

You can use the Feynman technique for anything you’re interested in learning.

Kids, if your parents tell you you’re on your own but want you to produce something, you can follow in Feynman’s footsteps to really nail a difficult concept or complex topic and then shout, “In yo’ face, aged ones!” politely, of course.

Feynman’s technique is brilliant in its simplicity. Not to get all high-falutin’ on you, but had Einstein lived long enough he would’ve loved it. Einstein said,

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

It’s possible Einstein made that same comment in Feynman’s presence; the two did know each other. Einstein presided over some of Feynman’s classes at Princeton and they met occasionally after Feynman moved on from the august New Jersey institution.

At any rate, Feynman created this workflow, and anyone can use it.

Choose a topic/concept.
Teach it to a child.
Identify gaps in understanding and go back to source material to fill them.
Revise your explanation from part 2 with the work from part 3 and, optionally, simplify it.

Step 1: Choose a topic

What is your kid interested in? Dinosaurs? Make-up? Horses? World War II German artillery? Drugs? Sex? Rock and roll?

Bring it on.

Take out a piece of paper and write the topic in large letters on the top of the page.

Step 2: Teach it to a child.

Next, they’ll write down everything they know about the topic as simply and clearly as they can. They should imagine that they’re explaining to someone a couple years younger than they are, with all the limitations of vocabulary and attention-span that entails.

For the sake of your sanity and getting things done, if your kid has chosen an enormous topic like, say, weapons of World War II (I work with lots of teenage boys), you may want to use the Question Formulation technique to help them narrow the scope of their work. This is actually a fun exercise to complete with your kids, but you need to follow the rules, mom and dad, or the final question will belong to you instead of your kid. If you’re a student doing this on your own, this may be where FaceTiming your friends and geeking out on a topic you all love will pay dividends in terms of your learning (and getting your parents off your back).

Step 3: Identify and fill gaps in your understanding.

During step 2, they might realize there are things they don’t know that they need to find out in order to thoroughly explain to their younger student.

This is where research skills can be built/improved, and also where supervision may be necessary. Start here to learn how to search effectively: quotation marks, – signs, asterisks, etc. are little known search heroes.

Kids are going to have to find ways to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. The internet is going to be most people’s go-to, and you can just leave it at that, but this is an excellent opportunity for you to discuss with them assessing the credibility of sources.

If they’re young you’re going to have to source the information to help them. I don’t know that I would recommend YouTube for younger kids, just because they don’t have the note-taking skills to make video work well as a method of direct instruction, but you could use it if you’re able to supervise their screen time and stop the video for them periodically so they can record pertinent information.

It can be helpful to teach them to Google Search their topic with the phrase “for kids” in quotes at the end. This will generally find you kid-friendly sources of information. If you’re willing to spend a little money, Encyclopedia Britannica has a beautiful site for kids for $8 a month ($75/year) for unlimited access. Encyclopedia.com is comprehensive and well-laid out and free. Brainpop is pretty great, but may not be as specific as your kid needs to fill in the gaps in her knowledge on a specific topic.

Libraries aren’t open right now, at least not in my metro or in many of my friends’, but if you have a library card you can access a ton of digital research sources. For my high school students, this can be a boon or a headache, depending on their ability to navigate their city/county system. But if you need to do heavier research and don’t like what Google is dishing out, try a trip to the digital resources page of your local library. Many school districts also pay for digital resource libraries; your school district office likely still has a librarian available to help you navigate these resources.

Remember, that for learning to happen, kids need to do something. When it comes to filling in knowledge-gaps through research, I recommend note-taking, pretty much exclusively, unless your kid has a photographic memory (which many small children actually seem to have, or at least a sponge-like ability to recall discrete facts, so don’t discount that).

Depending on your access to technology, your kids (or you) could be creating one-page sketch notes or diagrams in Adobe Illustrator as you listen to audio or watch a video. But if you’re like most families, paper and pencil are going to be your go-to.

Notes don’t have to be exhaustive. They should just fill in the blanks where your kid is/you are missing information.

For kids in 5th to 12th grade who want to just ingest content without processing it much, give them the gift of structure in the form of Cornell Notes. If they hate structure, or want to add creativity to note-taking structure or they want to use creativity to build a structure that makes sent to them, (creativity is GREAT for memory, FYI) have your kid try sketchnotes.

Whichever way you or your child process information, it’s important that you take the time to process it, because that makes finishing Feynman a lot easier.

Step 4: Revise your explanation for simplicity.

So now that we know what we didn’t know before and we have a more complete understanding of our topic of choice, it’s time to present our findings.

Can your kid just show you what they wrote and do a drawing and talk to you?

Sure. That’s a legitimate way to show what they’ve learned.

But you know what’s more fun?

Screencasting. YouTubing. Writing a letter… and sending it to an expert.

It’s time to buck up, buttercup, and ask someone more knowledgeable than you what you could have done better. If you’re super hardcore, you can see how you stand up under the withering criticism only YouTube commenters can provide.

If you need more ideas for how you/your kid can show learning authentically, here you go, my lovelies. It doesn’t have to be a report, mom and dad.

Give them a nudge, show that you care about what they care about, and let them show you what they can do. Then you can build on it, together.

TL;DR: You can use the Feynman technique to master anything.

STUDENTS: Take something you’re interested in and try to explain it in a way a kid 4-6 years younger than you could understand. DO something, don’t just think about it. Use these tips to conduct effective research, but know that watching videos or reading about a concept isn’t enough; to actually learn it you have to go through the creative process to nail down what you really know and what you don’t. And you need to put it all together, whether it’s written, drawn, acted out, etc.; the creative process turns information gathering into easily recalled knowledge, i.e., when you create something out of what you learned, you OWN the knowledge. It’s not learning if you can’t remember it a month from now.

PARENTS: Let your child choose a topic that floats their boat; intrinsic motivation produces better results. Support them in searching for relevant information. Let them choose the way they want to present the information. Periodically check their progress and give actionable feedback; try to keep your tone even and calm. Judge the work, not the kid. If you want to go next level, post their work on your social media and solicit helpful feedback and let your child revise their work until it’s great.

TEACHERS: I get it, you have content standards. But within those, can you free your students, at least a little? Let them ask their own questions. Let them find their own answers. Let them present their answers in novel, beautiful ways that aren’t in your wheelhouse. We’re all looking for freedom. You have the power to give it to your students.

What’s school for?

Not learning, that’s for sure.

When I started student teaching, I thought my purpose was to inspire students to love literature while helping them develop the basic analytical skills necessary for a life enriched, both literally and figuratively, by critical thought.

Within the first month of my contract, I realized how wrong I was. Most of my students (14 to 16-year-olds) wouldn’t read. Some couldn’t read. They definitely weren’t reading books at home.

In English, thinking follows reading, so you can see the problem here.

Of course, that was in a low-performing school where 95% of the students were at-risk, many of whom fell into multiple at-risk categories. What I’d been taught in teacher college was laughably impractical.

About two years into my career, I became friends with a colleague who remembered me from teacher training. We were in different programs so we didn’t see each other often, but I made an impression the one time our classes were combined by our Methods professor. This is how she recounted it:

“I thought you were such a bitch. The professor told us to assign the reading and then gave us ideas to debrief it with our students. You raised your hand and asked a question and it was like a bomb went off. You said, ‘What if they don’t read?’ And the professor responded with, ‘If you do what I’m saying they will read.’ And then you said, ‘Nope, I’ve done that. They didn’t. What else can I do?’ And she gave you something else which you’d tried. You told her that didn’t work either and asked again and again until she had nothing else to give you. Then you laughed. I felt sorry for her at the time and angry at you, but now I know where you were coming from and I can’t believe how poorly we were prepared for reality.”

I didn’t know how to get my students to learn, but at least they liked me. English, though? They hated English.

They hated it so much it was like an allergy. They actively avoided the practice necessary to internalize the skills to “do English.”

I thought that I could work harder and make my lessons better. That I could incorporate music they loved, turn writing and reading into a game, go off-script and choose texts with real-world relevance for my academically impoverished fellow chicanos.

Nothing worked. In class they were engaged (mostly), but the engagement didn’t translate onto their assessments, where I measured learning.

Colleagues chalk it up to poverty, the achievement gap, lack of early childhood education, language barriers, etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum. If you go onto any article decrying the state of education today, within three comments, you’ll find a teacher claiming schools can’t be held accountable for student learning if kids live in poverty.

I didn’t buy that, though. Every year there I worked my ass off, trying to balance the needs of my 200 kids at school with the needs of my actual family at home. Things would get better, but only marginally. My inputs were far, far greater than the output in student success. Anyone who has a background in business understands that when marginal cost exceeds marginal benefit, the best idea is to shut it down.

So I moved. To the kind of school most teachers dream of, where students monitor their own grades and are proactive about protecting their GPA, where parents are engaged but not overbearing, where kids’ basic needs are met at home so they arrive prepared to succeed. Most plan to attend college.

And yet… these kids aren’t learning much of anything either. Sure, they get good grades and they “do” enormous amounts of work, but are they skilled when they leave? Are they knowledgeable about any of the compulsory core subjects?

Not really.

Why?

Because they’ve learned that the work teachers assign in school is usually not reviewed closely, rarely receives meaningful feedback, and more often than not, is not required to score well on multiple-choice tests.

In other words, as long as the work looks done, they get points. When the test comes, more often than not, the teacher helpfully provides a study guide which kids can use to cram the night before the test and still do well. In some cases, the study guide is the test and the teacher gives the kids the answers to it the class before. Cramming is the #1 skill we teach in schools, even though in the age of Google, recall is less and less necessary and application is everything.

The incentive structure in schools is perverse, and I mean that in the strictest sense of the term, i.e. turning away from its prescribed course. These incentives create a vicious feedback loop that does nothing to give kids what their brains are geared for: real learning.

Teachers are under no requirement to ensure students learn the material; they are required to make sure kids pass classes. What’s the easiest way to do that? Make sure they get a passing grade. I’ll never forget my department chair telling us, in an official department meeting, “Give ’em all Ds and everyone wins. You don’t see a problem kid again, admin gets what they want, and the kid graduates.”

Unethical as hell, but logical, given the insanely long list of demands on teachers.

School leadership makes sound recommendations for pedagogical improvements, i.e., they tell us how to teach better. However, the way the system is set up makes solid, skills-focused pedagogy nearly impossible in practice. We’re supposed to differentiate instruction, i.e., customize learning experiences for each kid to meet them where they are, but we’re also supposed to do this in heterogeneous classrooms, which means our classes contain a random mixture of special ed students, Honors students, English Language Learners, “average kids”, and kids we tactfully refer to as “intentional non-learners.” And the student to teacher ratio in too many classrooms is 35 to 1.

We’re not even talking about all the other parts of the job: socio-emotional learning, building relationships, communicating with parents, designing meaningful assignments, building appropriate assessments, and creating a classroom climate conducive to learning which means not only minimizing student-to-student antagonism, but also helping students build collegiality with people with whom they may not gel. Even if this was possible, it is a Herculean (if not a Sisyphean) task.

Yet the only time admin actually gets on my case is when I have too many Fs in my gradebook.

Hmmmm… what to do? What to do?

Well, let’s do the math. The typical high school teacher has 200+ students. There is no compensation for the additional hours of labor required to ensure that students learn content and skills to mastery, and those hours are very large in number. Ask Rafe Esquith, the only teacher awarded the National Medal of the Arts by the President of the United States if you don’t believe me. Or ask his wife.

Some people will point to ethics here. They’ll say that we don’t teach because of the money, we are remunerated in satisfaction.

Except where is that satisfaction? It’s not coming from the kids. They are decidedly unappreciative when you introduce rigor and real work into the classroom. That’s not because they don’t crave real learning, it’s because school is not for real learning or rigor in their experience. In effect, you’re flipping the script on them when you insist on hard work. You can overcome the resentment if you’ve got great relationships with your students, but it’s really hard to build great relationships with 35 kids at once.

The saying “What gets measured gets done” is just as applicable to schools as businesses. Virtually the only thing that matters for a teacher to keep her job are grades, even though grades don’t measure learning; grades measure obedience.

The old guard knows that they have to do just enough to stay out of the crosshairs of administration. They have to talk a good game in the presence of principals and assistant principals, but behind the doors of their classroom, it can be business as usual. There are far too many classrooms and far too many other pulls on their time for the administrative team to pop in to regularly review classroom practice. So if you primarily lecture, you’re probably fine. If you are a packet-giver-outer, that’s okay. If you are an end-of-chapter-question assigner, you’re good too just as long as there aren’t too many Fs at the end of the semester.

Administration cannot accurately measure student growth. All the objections to standardized testing are legitimate. Principals can’t talk to every kid. They’re certainly not going to read piles of essays, even if they were assigned across the curriculum (they aren’t).

The easiest way to measure student performance (and teacher performance) is to look at grades.

And who controls those?

So this is what we’ve got here:

Teachers whose main performance measurement is students grades, which they control
Students who want to graduate but are habituated to busy work by the time they get to high school
Administrators who need their policy changes to appear to “work” to move up the ladder of District leadership
School scores largely based on graduation rates
Families who like high school scores because they protect property values.

Everybody has a reason to want high graduation rates, which come from passing grades.

Only a sado-masochist would buck this trend.

Kids aren’t lazy. Teachers aren’t lazy. Both groups will, however, do what human evolution has programmed deep into their brains: expend the least labor necessary to survive.

I can’t help but think of that old Soviet line: We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.

TL;DR: Kids don’t learn in school because the incentive structure is perverse.

STUDENTS: The only thing I can tell you is that when you get that rare teacher who pushes you hard, and you resent the hell out of it try to understand that teacher might actually be the one who cares the most about your future, even if they’re not the warm and fuzzy type.

PARENTS: Ask to see your kid’s work. Talk to them about what they’re learning. When they say, “Nothing,” trust them and see if you can get them learning in other ways.

TEACHERS: Be the change you want to see in your school. Think about your current practice and student outcomes. Are you asking students to do what you do or just regurgitate what you say? If the answer is the latter, change one thing to give them the skills they need to succeed, even if it does not result in comprehensive subject knowledge.

Do Your Homework, Just Don’t Sweat It

Well, this is going to be my most hypocritical post to date. It was supposed to be done roughly five weeks ago. Instead, I’ve been buried under my actual job so I haven’t been here for you. For that, I apologize.

The good news is that your life doesn’t have to look like mine, and the reason for that is simple.

Most of the work you do in class will never be read.

That’s right, my chickadees, the vast majority of what you do will get a cursory glance to judge its completeness. That’s it.

Nobody is checking to see if your answers are correct.

Nobody is checking to see if your reasoning is sound.

No one cares whether or not you read the book.

What they do want to see, and what they are looking for is obedience: did you finish the work or not?

Some of you know this already, which is why “collaboration” on homework is so extensive. Sending pics of your completed homework via phone or “researching” answers on Google is the most efficient way to get those sweet, sweet homework points.

The problem is that you’re not getting any real practice. Here’s the rub: most of the time homework isn’t adequate practice either (except in math; if you’re blowing off math homework, you’re begging to fail the tests, which may or may not matter depending on the weight of your test grade.)

Here’s the thing you may not know, but which I’ve mentioned before. School isn’t really about learning. School is about getting points and the easiest way to get points is through compliance.

Bells tell you where to go and when you have to get there. Your classes are chosen for you based on your age; not on what’s best for you at your current level of learning. Your teachers are chosen for you based on numbers, not on who would be the best fit for your personality. You sit where we assign you. You eat when we tell you. You go to the bathroom when we let you. You answer when you’re called on. You are only allowed to relax when we decide you’ve earned it.

Your day is micromanaged in a way that would cause an uprising in many small countries.

We simultaneously tell you that you are responsible for making good choices (which really means choosing the thing whoever is in charge at the time wants you to choose) while also subtly implying that you are incapable of doing so by structuring your day in a way that gives you almost no agency.

L. O. L.

So here’s how to win: do everything the teacher tells you on paper, but spend little to no time on it, except in math, which I’ll give you a better structure for below.

Obey, but preserve your time and you will maximize your homework grade.

This strategy will work in almost every class unless, by some unfortunate stroke of luck, you find yourself in a class with a teacher who will actually assess whether or not you’re learning the material they’re asking you to master. You’ll know this by the weight of the tests.

Grade weighting generally refers to the practice of making a particular type of assignment or assignment category count for more of the course grade than another. This information should be found on a course syllabus, but if you can’t find it, ask your teacher if he uses weighted grades. He should be happy to explain it to you. Additionally, if the teacher uses a grading program, you should be able to see grade weight by accessing the gradebook information for that class.

Fortunately for you, a heavily-weighted test grade is rare outside of math classes.

Here’s the dirty secret about school: administration needs everyone to pass in order for the school to look good, score-wise. That means they subtly pressure teachers to make sure that very few students actually fail. They do this in many ways, but the most important way they do that is by creating an extensive list of requirements a teacher must meet before they can actually give a student an F in a class. Usually, a teacher will have to document the academic interventions they’ve tried, like moving your seat, adjusting your assignments, talking to you privately, and giving you extended time on assignments (i.e., accept your late work). While we make all those adjustments (and keep track of them) we’re supposed to communicate our concerns to you and hopefully talk you into doing what we want you to do. If you still don’t respond, we’re supposed to contact your parents. This can take many forms, but it generally starts with sending home progress reports, moves to contacting your parents by phone, and finally, having an after school meeting with you, your parents, and your counselor, sometimes with a principal present. Only then can we justify giving you that F.

Now, imagine you’re a tenured high school teacher. You have a choice in front of you: go through all that work, or just give you a 59.6% in the class.

I’ll never forget the first time Mike said in a department meeting, “Why don’t we all just make it an unspoken policy to give kids a D? You can’t really want to see these kids again, and there’s no upside to an F.”

I was shocked (shocked I tell you!) to hear this man I respected and had gone to for pedagogical advice say that out loud in his official capacity as team leader.

Boy was I ever naive.

When you look at it honestly, his response is the rational one. His way means less work for teachers, love from administration, and limited time nagging kids who don’t want to be there.

It’s so much easier just to keep everyone “at C level”, the cringeworthy pun invented by one of our Assistant Superintendents. Yes, he has ~~a Ph.D.~~ an Ed.D.

Still, it is possible that you will occasionally have a true believer (or a teacher who’s a really good actor) who expects you to learn something from the homework and will test you on it.

If that does happen, the best thing I can teach you is workload management.

The best tool for workload management is the Pomodoro technique. A Pomodoro is a focused period of time, usually 25 minutes, where you put your phone on Do Not Disturb or on Airplane Mode (or if you really want to be held accountable, give your phone to your mom to hide until the alarm goes off) to shut down notifications so you can work without distractions. 25 minutes on, 5-minute break, then back to another 25-minute Pomodoro. After 4 repetitions, you take a longer 20 minute break.

Do Pomodoros until you finish the assignment. If you get stuck, review your notes. If reviewing your notes doesn’t help you, formulate a specific question to email to your teacher. That way, if you hit a wall and can’t go further in the homework, you can email them before the assignment is due to ask the question you’ve formulated and request an extension, while continuing to work on any problems you can make it through.

In general, if you are making an honest effort to complete the homework and really trying to understand it, a teacher is willing to offer you an extension on the homework. Just remember it’s on you to follow up and turn in the work once you get some help with the assignment or problem you couldn’t sort out.

Most importantly, actually doing the work should result in high test scores. Just remember, you should know the category weighting for each class; if homework is worth half your grade, you really don’t have to score all that well on tests to get high grades.

TL;DR: Most teachers value compliance over learning; it’s easier to measure.

STUDENTS: Your homework probably won’t be looked at, so do the bare minimum unless the teacher actually will test you on what you do on the homework. Ask for this information upfront, and pay attention to tests/quizzes at the beginning of the semester to ascertain whether or not your attention to homework (e.g., reading, notes, worksheets, etc.) matters in terms of your grade. If it does matter, prioritize those assignment and use the Pomodoro technique to focus, learn more, and get your homework done faster.

PARENTS: Do not sweat every piece of homework; all zeroes are not created equal. Have an open conversation with your student about her observations regarding her teachers’ grading policies. Get on the same team with your kid and help her set priorities with her work (as well as her cell phone.)

TEACHERS: if you’re not going to assess it, don’t assign it. Feedback is necessary when working with important topics, but not every worksheet has to be do or die. If it is do or die, you need to actually read it (or formatively assess while students are working on it) and reteach/enrich where necessary. Otherwise, you’re setting the majority of your students up to fail.

The Easiest Way to Get High Grades

The first step to winning a game is to show up.

You probably already know this, but secondary school isn’t about learning and/or personal growth; it’s a game. Some students hate it and refuse to play while others achieve Super Saiyan level. If you’re here, you likely recognize that you’re not maximizing your potential. So let’s see if we can’t sort you out.

First, we’ve got to identify the goal of the game. What is it?

Points.

You’re currently thinking about all the teachers you’ve just met and how they really seem to care and are all using the My-classroom-is-different-I-really-want-you-to-learn-the-material! syllabus presentation. I’ll admit that some of them are telling the truth. They really do care if you learn. If you’ve got a burnout who should be retired (and I might be talking about a 32-year-old here), you’ll know, so your job with him is easier. All he really wants is to get through the year with minimum hassle. That’s VERY good news for points-players since all you have to do is demonstrate that you (and hopefully your parents too, if you can get them on board) will be deeply concerned and very engaged if you get too many scores lower than 90%.

But the deluded teachers who think they’re actually teaching you something? They are the ones you need help with. Vaya con dios, mijo if you have a true believer in the power of public education.

Those people will change your life – usually for the worse – because they deny reality: that school is a game where the only thing that’s measurably incentivized are high GPAs themselves. What is not incentivized is internalizing knowledge and processes to support the analysis of complex problems in order to facilitate methodical, nuanced evaluation of the best answers and eventual application thereof.

Wait, what? Do people do that in school?

Sure, but it’s iridium-rare.

You know what’s not rare though?

Participation points, worksheets, and multiple choice tests. Those, my friends, are your moneymakers.

There are more or less three ways to get points with these teachers:

Show up.
Work.
Test.

We’ll deal with #1 this week. Over the next three weeks as I cover #2 and #3, you’ll get an overview of a strategy to help you make it through this year with optimal grades.

1. Show Up.

Many teachers will not give you points just for coming, but some do. What will affect your grade, attendance-wise, is walking into class late. Teachers often subtract points for that. The savviest ones will do that by having a quiz or Do-Now activity on the board that they will tell you can’t be made up if you’re not in class.

Sidenote: that’s not technically legal, at least not in Cali, so you could challenge them on it, BUT if you do that, you’re more than likely going to receive make-up work that’s ten times harder than the original quiz/Do-Now, so here’s ProTip #1:

If you’re hunting points, get to class on time.

I already gave you one reason, but here’s the Big Chungus: walking in late makes you look disrespectful.

Look, you and I both know that it’s not really disrespectful, it’s just that you have different priorities and, for whatever reason, on days you come late, the value of getting to class on time is less than the value you place on whatever made you tardy.

The problem is this: teachers take it personally. If you read my first post, you’ll understand this, but if you didn’t, the TL;DR is that teachers often suspect they’re ineffective. Sure, they’re good at lots of quantifiable things: worksheets graded in an hour; emails written over lunch; letters of recommendation finished in an evening, documents word processed cleanly. What they can’t quantify is how well you learned from them. (Grades do not accurately reflect learning: change my mind.)

So imagine the thing you’re getting paid a princely sum to do (and by princely I mean that, in general, teachers earn more than the average worker in any geographical area and work 66% of the time that average worker does) is something you have no idea if you’re good at because there is no tangible evidence to prove it..

You might get the odd, anecdotal You’re-my-favorite-teacher-ever-I’m-learning-so-much-in-your-class from a student, but as you Super Saiyans know, compliments like that aren’t always sincere, especially near the end of a grading period.

Teachers know that too.

Grades are a terrible measure of learning. Every single one of you can recount a class where you never cracked the textbook, did little to no work (or had Google do it for you), pseudo-studied with friends for a couple of hours the night before the final exam and still managed a B or an A. If you tell me you learned anything in that class other than how misaligned the rewards are to the stated goal, you’re a lying liar who lies.

Some teachers like to point to exam scores. Unfortunately, any idiot can teach to a four-option multiple choice test, especially when he has the test in his hand from day one.

I’ll give the AP/IB teachers some credit here, just because they can’t be exactly sure what will be on the test. After a few years though, they should have a pretty good idea of what their students need to know so they’re definitely teaching to a test rather than looking for opportunities to measure students higher-level thinking and problem-solving skills. And that’s because the College Board can’t measure those either; it would eviscerate their sky-high profit margins.

I prefer using essays as assessments, but we all know that essay grading is arbitrary and essay writing usually consists of repeating what the teacher told you in lecture while furiously overcomplicating your sentences and throwing in [often poorly-chosen] SAT-vocab synonyms for shorter words to meet the length requirement. And let’s just skip the conversation about manipulating margins, kerning, and punctuation font sizes.

The problem with all of the aforementioned is that none of these methods can accurately gauge learning; they usually only measure recall. They can’t account for nuance. They can’t address individual interest. They can’t bring the best out in you. Any analysis used in a paper is, more often than not, parroted from lecture or, even worse, stolen from the internet or, still worse, paid to some likely much harder-working citizen of a developing nation.

And every teacher knows that. That’s why when those stupid Hero Teacher movies come out, it’s always some anecdotal, Hollywood-massaged poppycock about how the students developed as people, often using test scores (see above) or college acceptances (don’t get me started) or personal development (how do you quantify that?) as proof positive of effective teaching.

Anywayyyyyyzzzzz, what I’m saying is that your teachers know, whether it’s a conscious thought after much observation and analysis or at a more primal level, that they have no idea how good they are or even if they are.

But your attendance? That they can control through punishment. More importantly for our purposes here, this perceived dis biases them against you. No matter how fair-minded a teacher prides himself on being, he will notice if you are frequently late or missing, and he will consider it an act of defiance on your part, whether or not that is actually the case. He will take it personally.

How do you think that’s going to affect you when you end up with an 89.4 in a class?

So don’t be late.

And this should honestly go without saying, but, just in case it doesn’t: don’t ditch class.

If you care about your grades, these are literally the easiest adjustments you can make to achieve your overarching goals: get that GPA to bust out while simultaneously having one of the best years of your life.

TL;DR Advice for stakeholders

Students:

Don’t ditch.
Be on time.
Let burned out teachers know that you really, really care about your grade. Be subtle, but consistent over time in things like asking for help after class, seeking him out during office hours, and emailing.

Parents/Guardians:

Don’t be the reason your kid is late.
If you’re going to come down on your kid for anything school-related, make it attendance. In most cases, you have next to no influence over a tenured teacher. However, your child can control how respectful he seems by showing up consistently and on-time. That’s often enough to help smooth over less-than-stellar academic performance.
If your kid has a teacher who should’ve retired years ago, encourage your child to ask lots of clarifying questions, come in for office hours or for help after school, and email frequently with polite concerns about the class, instructions, and your child’s performance; if your emails are ignored, CC an assistant principal on future emails. That teacher will want you to go away, so grade issues may also magically disappear.

Teachers:

Stop taking student lateness personally. It likely has nothing to do with you.
However, if the numbers of tardy students are significant, seek help to figure out what you can do to get students invested without using force, i.e punishment. If you’re at a functional school and large numbers of students are unconcerned about being late, they don’t see the value in your class. With mandatory K-12 schooling, unfortunately, it’s your job to convince them of its relevance.
Pay attention to what students say about and how they prepare for your tests. If they can cram, or don’t have to study at all, all of you have wasted your time. What a low down dirty shame that is. You’re the one getting paid, so figure out how to make assessments meaningful to them. In other words, your assessments should build student confidence because they are demonstrating their skills and the application of their knowledge, not just choosing the right answer on a multiple choice test or repeating what you told them in a lecture.
You can do this.

The Right Introduction Will Raise Your GPA

Start your school year right by letting your teachers know that what matters to them also matters to you.

You’re about to start school. Other than actively dreading having to get up before noon, and maybe having picked out just the right clothes to set the tone for the school year, what’s your plan?

Because you need a plan.

If you’re here, my guess is you’re looking for more than the basic listen, participate, work hard and study line.

So here it is: send your teachers an email.

I’m not advocating subterfuge or manipulation or sucking up. I’m advocating reflection, humility, and communication.

You need to understand something about teachers. We have a lot of power over you. We can make your life easy or hard. We can make it interesting or tedious. We can literally waste hours of it.

But mostly what you have to remember about us: we are insecure.

Wait? That tyrant who yells at us is nervous? That lady who cries every time she reads a poem isn’t confident? The hot young teacher who passes out detentions like candy on Halloween is scared?

Yup. They are. We all are. And it’s because deep down, none of us can be sure we know what we’re doing because we have no way to accurately measure the quality of our work.

Spend some time in r/teachers and you’ll quickly see that teachers love it when they run into a student and that kid says, “Hey, Mr. So-and-so!” and is actually excited to see him. They will literally write an essay on Reddit to tell other teachers that the job isn’t hopeless and that, yes, in fact, some kids actually don’t hate them and that, maybe, just maybe, a teacher can make a difference in a kid’s life.

You’re sitting here, thinking, Well, yeah, of course. I mean, my 3rd grade teacher really helped me with my printing. And in 7th grade I had an art teacher that showed me no one is really born with talent; it’s cultivated over time. And there was that coach that was always there to listen to me and tell me the hard things I didn’t want to hear, but I knew that guy really cared about me.

Back to Reddit though. Search the posts and you should quickly see how rarely we hear things like that.

We have no idea if you’re listening politely because you’re worried that we’ll grade you harshly if you don’t or if you’re genuinely interested. We don’t know if you think what we’re saying is important or if you’re furiously taking notes because it’s a requirement for your AVID class. Our tests are rarely useful metrics of your learning because so many of us use multiple choice, for which we all know most kids will just cram the night before and promptly forget the period after.

The only legitimate method to measure what you’ve learned is to have a conversation with you, which should happen in class but doesn’t because (A) there’s not enough time for a one-on-one with each kid in a classroom and (B) there’s very little measurable upside to talking for you because teachers don’t track how often you speak, let alone the quality of your comments and some of your peers will attempt to destroy you for asking a question. It’s logical for you to avoid participation since the risk outweighs the possible return.

So you want to get off on the right foot this year?

Step 1: Scour each course syllabus to find something that reveals your teacher’s values. Is it organization? Kindness? Thoughtful participation? Curiosity? Discipline? (The best place to find this is in any classroom rules or guidelines the teacher created. If all the teacher does is repeat school policy, you’re going to have to look harder to figure out what he believes in.)

Step 2: Send a brief, individualized email to each teacher introducing yourself and letting him/her know that you read the syllabus and that you’re interested in developing your organization/kindness/participation/curiosity/discipline. We all have room to grow, so this should not be a disingenuous statement. Let each instructor know that you’re looking forward to working on that trait this year in the classroom and explicitly state that if he/she has any advice about how you can grow as a student this year, you’d value it.

That’s it.

Now, what does opening yourself up like this do?

You show that you care enough about your own success to take the time to read what the course will cover.
You demonstrate that you are both able to find the underlying importance of the course to the teacher and care enough to apply it to your real life.
You show humility in admitting that there are places where you need work.
You have shown respect by deferring to the teacher and asking him to help you wherever he can without being overly demanding of his time.

In one brief email, you’ve turned yourself into a mentee rather than just another member of a disinterested crowd. You haven’t asked specifically for more time or attention, but you have demonstrated that you care and want to be actively engaged in the class to improve your habits, your education, and/or yourself as a human being.

Now, for all of you afraid of doing this because you think it will focus more attention on you, it shouldn’t. Unless you have the most tone-deaf teacher on the planet (which, I admit, is a risk, if a minor one), he’s not going to call you out in front of class. He may just come talk to you briefly while you’re working. If you were honest about what you’d like to gain in the class, you may receive some valuable feedback on your performance and/or useful tips for future success in the class. Even if you weren’t 100% sure that you hit the right note with your email, you may still benefit.

Either way, you’ve done something in about two minutes that it will take some students all semester to do: create a favorable impression.

Teachers are human, thus, we carry the prejudices inherent to humanity. Your teacher may believe himself to be the most judicious evaluator in the history of the American education system, but I can tell you right now that if you humbly ask for help, are gracious when you receive it, and try to apply it, you will create a huge bias in your favor.

In other words, you will be graded more favorably than your unknown-to-the-teacher peers.

And for all of you who will criticize this post, claiming that it’s manipulative to influence a teacher’s opinion in this way, I leave you with this 150-year-old piece of wisdom: The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

TL;DR: Create a favorable impression with your teachers by showing them what they care about matters to you too.

STUDENTS: Suss out your teacher’s values by reviewing his syllabus and listening to what he/she says in the first week of school and find some common ground. In a concise email, ask him for help developing a skill or attribute that he values. A favorable impression should help your grade as the year drags on.

PARENTS: Be on your kid’s side, always, but try to help them understand that in the Art of War (and business and love), appealing to a teacher’s better nature early in the year before anyone is struggling often pays dividends.

TEACHERS: Make an attempt to talk to all of your students. Be human. Make mistakes and admit to them. They won’t say it, but they’ll respect you for it, and if they respect you, they won’t question your judgment, e.g., their grade in your class. And, more importantly, if they know you’re human and you recognize their humanity, they’ll learn more in your class.

Manifesto

I want to help every one of you reading this, but for full transparency, my goal is to change the way all public schools do business. If enough of you follow the advice I’m giving, the monolithic, one-size-fits-none high schools across our country will have to adapt and maybe, just maybe, American public education will be better for the next generation.

Like you, I know high school sucks. Unlike you, I’ve spent 20 years in it. I’m a teacher, the enemy. But before you dismiss me, let me explain why I’m here.

Unlike an alarmingly high number of high school teachers who return to the school they graduated from, I don’t work at my alma mater. That’s because I don’t look back on high school with nostalgia.

High school was a drag. Boring classes. People all around who wanted me dead or, even worse, didn’t know I existed. Crappy food. A pathetically tiny amount of time with friends. Teachers who didn’t teach. Teachers who thought they could teach. A handful of teachers who could, as long as you judge “learning” by a test grade and are unfazed that the knowledge evaporated the second the exam ended. Homework nobody checked. Papers nobody read. A laughably small number of assignments that helped me grow into a functioning human.

And I didn’t have wifi to distract me from the pointless tedium of it all. That’s right: we geriatrics deserve your pity. You owe your mom a hug because she barely survived it.

Hold up, M. You’re perpetuating this shizz. Why do this?

Two reasons:

Life is short.
You are awesome.

Life is short. Statistically, you’re going to live into your 80s. Right now, you’re thinking, It’s only four years, D. Why you trippin’? Four years when you’re 14 doesn’t seem so long. When you’re 18, you’ll be surprised at how quickly they flew by. Four years to an adult? An eternity. You could get married, have babies, and get divorced in four years. You could become a startup-stock-option billionaire in four years. You could easily see most of the world in four years. You could write the great American novel in four years, fewer if we’d get out of your way and stop requiring four pages of drivel (with citations!) every grading period.

So why should you waste any more time than the bare minimum necessary to get you out of here and on to the next (hopefully not) hoop-jumping phase in your life?

You are amazing. I’m flying in the face of multiple warnings from my required annual sexual harassment training here, but I’m just going to come out and say that I love you. Yes, you. You in the back, the quiet kid that’s clean cut and a little acne-prone but looking up at me when I talk. And you, the dyed-purple-haired kid with an unpronounceable preferred pronoun and a glint in your eye whenever I say something that mocks the system. And you, yeah, you over there, the one who never makes eye contact with me, hiding under your clearly unwashed hoodie with it’s sickly-sweet stench of hotboxed pot. And even you, the unblinking, note-taking, hyper-performer who IS GOING TO STANFORD and wants to know what extra credit opportunities are currently available.

Before you go thinking this will be some lovey-dovey, everyone-is-a-special snowflake thing, yeah… no. Although you make me smile almost constantly, even when you barely tolerate my system-perpetuating ass, some of you need a swift kick in the pants. Too many of you are coddled and weak, and the number of you who aren’t coddled are often acting out of terror: terror of your teachers, terror of disappointing your parents, and terror that your life won’t turn out the way you envision.

In the classroom, it’s my privilege to watch (and sometimes help) roughly 250 of you grow.

But I want to do it for more of you. Millions more.

If you’re the parent of a high schooler and you’re reading this, I’m here for you too. You’re probably only going to shepherd one or two kids through this system. Your kids only get one shot at a great education. Your learning curve is steep, and I hope I can make the next 4-6 years less of a slog and more of a mostly enjoyable hike, with only a few sections that make you question your decision to reproduce.

I’m lucky my spouse is so good with money; my family will be okay (if living on a much tighter budget) if I succeed here and the school district I work for elects not to renew my contract.

Either that, or more of you will see the rot for what it is and push for school choice.

There’s too much at stake: your kids, my kids, our economy, and the future of the Republic. I’m with Thomas Jefferson here. He wrote to James Madison that “a little rebellion, now and then, is a healthy thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

Young Americans, it’s time to bring the thunder.