The more I teach, the more I observe and reflect, and sometimes this leads to a few shopworn pedagogical theories that aren’t backed by anything other than a hunch.
In fact, most veteran teachers, I’ve found, harbor a few odd ideas that are key to their success. A lot of these theories are classroom management-focused. I once taught with a shop teacher who truly lived by the old maxim of never smile in front of your students until Thanksgiving. Then there was a fellow English teacher whose mantra (which he picked up from his time with the nuns) was “devour one in the presence of many” — meaning, if you needed to reprimand a student, do it when there’s an audience of his/her peers, the larger the better. It will not surprise you to learn he had impeccable classroom management. (In fact, in my experience classroom management is one area that even the most progressive teacher becomes close-minded. It’s a skill that can only be learned on the job, and when you find something that works for you, you stick to it.)
My own eccentric theory has nothing to do with classroom management (I smile at most of my class way before Thanksgiving), but instead relates to those first stressful days of school. In my earlier years I would extrapolate so much from my first few sessions with a class — their temperament, aptitude, sense of humor. If my first classes didn’t go as well as I hoped, I girded myself for a tough year ahead. It tended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as my visible nervousness would result in more tepid classes. Such are the joys of being a young teacher.
While I do think first impressions are important, it’s important to maintain perspective. You see students for ninety classes (if you have block scheduling like we do). It’s easy to get caught in the deception of a small sample size, especially at the beginning of the year, when our perception is distorted by these first impressions (to say nothing of all the other stresses that come with starting a school year). The behaviors of these new faces and names in our rooms are easy to over-analyze.
But eventually I realized that teaching is not like football, which has only sixteen games that are laboriously analyzed before stressing about the next matchup. Teaching, if you have to compare it to a sport, is more like baseball. There are 162 games in a team’s regular season, and a lot happens to shape how the entire season is viewed. Even the best clubs experience loss streaks, and sometimes the worst ones begin the year extremely hot (this year’s Mariners began the year 13-2 but are about to enter September 55-75, twenty games under .500). I’m not saying that if your year has started strong in the classroom, you should be looking for trouble. All I’m saying is that baseball players, like teachers, make daily preparations for their job, which they then put into action for several hours. When it’s over, successful or unsuccessful, they move on to the next one. Derek Jeter, overrated as he may have been as a shortstop, understood the value of this attitude: “You never try to get too high or too low. Just play every game, just treat every game like it’s the same.” In our jobs, you learn what you can from the day’s events, but you always have another game/class to look forward to.
Which now brings me to my very own Eccentric Teaching Theory: you don’t really know anything about your students until you have had fifteen classes with them.
We tend to apply labels to our classes early in the year. Some are good, others are fun, some difficult, others exhausting. I’ve learned to reserve any sort of judgement about a class as a whole until I have spent a sixth of a school year with them. Anything before that is too small a sample size.
I arrived at this theory through the world of baseball statistics by way of fantasy baseball. During the course of a season, especially in the first months, fans are inundated with player statistics. To succeed in fantasy baseball, it’s important to know when a player’s statistics should be viewed as representative of their true abilities and not just a small-sample fluke. For batters, many of their season stats, like strikeout rate, don’t reach a stable point until they have had one hundred plate appearances. This is about a sixth of the average plate appearances a regular player will take per season.
One April a few years ago, I was meditating on whether to drop Miguel Cabera from my fantasy team. He was doing very poorly, and there were so many hot hitters of lesser name value sitting on the waiver wire. When I asked a friend for advice, he said for me to not overreact. Miggy, despite a horrible start to the spring, had thousands of prior plate appearances that attested to his abilities and urged patience over those high fliers on the waiver wire who had been experiencing success for a week or two (this was the spring Eric Thames demolished the league for month). In this case, patience hurt my team, as Cabera struggled the whole season. But after that I began to consider the application of sample size in the rest of my life, and how it applied to my career.
Why fifteen? Why set the number at exactly one-sixth of the way through those ninety classes? After fifteen classes, a teacher knows her students’ personality and academic abilities. In this time span most teachers have administered diagnostics and taught several lessons of new content. There have probably been multiple quizzes. There will have been opportunities for additional students to enroll or drop. From a behavioral standpoint, both students and teachers will have shaken off any summer lethargy. They’ll be themselves. After fifteen classes, the teacher has a clear picture of their strengths and weaknesses, and it should guide subsequent planning for the rest of the school year.
I know that this is a theory that relies solely on my own observations. It contains no longitudinal data. It’s empirical as all get out. If you were to actually set the criteria well enough to measure it (with a suitable sample size of participants, of course), I’m sure it would all be deemed bunk.
However, as I begin my tenth year in the classroom, I feel I have earned an Eccentric Teaching Theory, especially if it puts me in a positive mindset (never too high, never too low) where I can provide the best experience for my students.