The daily agendas were rather simple.  They contained usually 3 or 4 items we would cover and the day's homework assignment-no big deal.  But as it turned out, it was a big deal, at least to one of my students, Juan!  And as I later realized, Juan was not alone since teens never travel alone but rather in herds.

Season One: Race to the Top

Our hero John Dewey faces a day to remember in this ambitious spin-off, which highlights a harrowing day in the life of a high school social studies teacher.

When the media circus around the Tiger Woods scandal began, I thought that it was funny that as different as his world is from our humble lives as teachers, in some ways he and other celebrities could learn some useful life lessons from us.

When I started teaching, I thought that having a good class discussion would be just like having the discussions I had with my family at the dinner table where everyone wanted to jump in and share, and no one's feeling got hurt because we knew we were all just trading ideas. I quickly realized that class discussions were more difficult to manage and maintain for a number of reasons. Here are a few things I wish I had known sooner.

As a group, our cohort of prospective teachers was a very confident bunch, sure that we were going to change the American education system, and here was Horace, the amalgam of hundreds of classroom teachers observed by Sizer in his trips around the US, presenting a very startling picture of what education was like for many students and teachers. The beauty of Sizer’s portrayal of Horace was that he was neither a hero nor a villain; he was just an overworked teacher toiling in a joyless factory system of education, which was serving very few well. Horace didn’t scare me away from teaching, but he prepared me for the realities and gave me respect for the veterans with whom I would work.

And Sizer, obviously, did much more than just outline Horace’s reality; he--with other visionaries like Deborah Meier—launched the Coalition for Essential Schools movement which would provide bold new ideas to help American schools become more community-based and personalized, to have teachers treat ALL students as active participants in their learning not as passive vessels to be filled, and to make assessment more authentic and based on mastery of skills not regurgitation of content.

It has always been interesting to me that so few teachers I know actually read education research. We all know many of the reasons why that is so. As teachers, we are incredibly busy, right or wrong we think we know everything, and much of what is written by education researchers is so painful to read that even if there were some some nuggets of helpful wisdom, we ignore the whole field out of self-preservation. FacultyShack itself was created as an effort to react to that situation and to share knowledge in a more conversational way, but there are (some) good things being written in education research journals. For awhile we had been talking about trying to recruit researchers to write short, jargon-free essays about pieces of research they were doing. Well, as is the case on the net these days, someone beat us to it, and we are big enough to admit that they are doing it as well as we could and IT IS ALL ON VIDEO!

The Voice is a video ed-journal based out of Columbia Teachers (shouldn't that have an apostrophe?) that has researchers give short (around three minute) summaries of articles they have submitted to Teachers College Record. They have entries from some of the biggest names in education research and some people you most likely have never heard of. The viewer will prompt you to watch many in succession, but we will periodically highlight one or two that we think are particularly interesting. This week Adam Howard a professor from Colby College describes a provocative piece on students' views on privilege. Let us know what you think and suggest other clips that you find useful. Here is a link to The Voice. We are working on embedding the player.

While the answer is obvious, as teachers (at least as most of the teachers I know who read and write for this journal) we often don’t get the “it depends” part. We often soldier on trying harder to solve things that can’t be solved or taking on more committee work because there is no one else who is funded to do it. We get ourselves into a state that is truly unhealthy, and we know it is, but we continue on.

What I couldn’t swallow is someone telling me I don’t know anything about children.

Here’s her view of teachers, and if it were the first time I’d met this prejudice, I wouldn’t be half so mad as hell. (Let’s also note for the record that she didn’t count my stepson who visits but doesn’t live with us. Apparently the fact that I’ve known him since he was eight is trumped by the fact that I never had him as a toddler.) The view: if you don’t take them home at night, your 40-person classroom never counted. I would like to see some of these people who claim inability to control one, two, or three children is somehow excusable when I had to get 20 – 40 students every day for 15 years to listen to me. Certain parents will argue that the classroom doesn’t count because I had detention and principals at my fingertips.  Um, those were my very last resorts, thank you very much.  Yet let’s imagine: I were not able to control a classroom of 40, all of a sudden I would be highly responsible if not liable. For sure I’d be on the local evening news that loves its mayhem and scandals. The same mom who lets her kid run amok in the coffee shop, the library, the $40 a plate restaurant, the fitness center….she is never liable. She will always trump arguments with, My child is a toddler, my child is spirited, I’m tired. Meanwhile, me on a field trip with 40 crossing the street…?  Funny how that works, that double standard.