Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) has administered Tripod student surveys district-wide since 2011. While survey results have been primarily used to inform teacher practice, and beginning last year, summative evaluations, we have recently become interested in using Tripod data to understand and improve the climate and culture of our schools.
Like many teachers, I spent much of my first year failing spectacularly at classroom management. At 23, I was hardly older than many of my students, and I seriously questioned my right to exert any Control over them. I knew intellectually that refusing to own my authority would do nothing but harm; I just couldn’t seem to act consistently on that knowledge.
Sometimes it is, of course. But I’d argue that, much of the time, to Clarify is precisely to complicate.
I recently received a letter from a former student who is now in sixth grade. She began with a question: “Did you ever have that teacher that inspired you to do things, who always helped you when you thought you couldn’t do something? Well, I did!” She went on to explain how she had previously despised reading and thanked me for motivating her to read in our second grade class. She went on to say, “One of my favorite series you ever read to us was The Cricket in Times Square.”.
Gazing tiredly at a pile of unimpressive mini-essays after school one day, I had an idea. Instead of writing comments on every paper, I hid each student’s name and photocopied the whole stack. Then—I went home!
Facebook recently tested a new feature: “satire” tags that warn gullible readers when a news story or web site is a joke. I sincerely hope none of my former students needs to rely on it. In fact, though I’m not sure what this says about me, two of my all-time favorite teaching resources are hoaxes.
The first time I let my students choose their own topics for a research paper, my logic was simple: I wanted the assignment to Captivate them. The decision turned out to have far-reaching consequences, however—effects quite beyond anything I had intended or imagined.
I’m that teacher, the one who always breaks down at graduation. It’s become a running joke between my husband and me, my dragging him to school once a year so I can cry shamelessly on his shoulder as he makes awkward small talk with teenagers he’s never met. It’s a joke with my students, too: “Make sure you bring some tissues, Ms. Bradshaw!” I say I’ll be stocking up at Costco.
My seventh grade English teacher was a merciless grammarian. No nonstandard utterance went unpunished. “MINES?” she’d roar at least once a day. Then, icily: “Mines explode. Are you talking about a war?”
