Students can very quickly learn email etiquette

Starting in my second year at Champe I added a disclaimer in my syllabus that I don’t respond to emails that don’t contain a salutation, a polite message, and a farewell. I provided a model of what that looks like. No issues after that!  

Names are the most important thing 

I’ve talked about this before. But I would add that you shouldn’t limit this practice to the first week of school. Throughout the rest of the year, the more students you meet, the more students whose names you learn, the more connections you build, the greater your rapport and your ability to help maintain a positive school culture. It doesn’t guarantee you will magically earn a student’s respect just because you know their name. But not knowing anything about them certainly makes it more challenging. 

Never show the wrong way to do something

This came from API training during the summer of 2017. It was by far the most interesting and enriching professional development I have ever attended. There are so many concepts from that week-long training that I still use in my class (yearlong assigned seats, asking students to predict scores, having students articulate their goals). But the most important one is never showing students the wrong way to perform a skill. I think it’s pretty common to include “common mistakes” in a lesson, with examples. The API instructor, who was formerly a coach, talked about it in terms of fielding a ground ball: if the student knows nothing but the correct way, there is no risk of them getting confused, panicking, and modeling the incorrect way they also saw. Students have half a dozen other classes. They have a limited amount of brain space devoted to your class. Don’t clutter it with examples of the wrong way to write a thesis, the wrong way to structure an essay. 

Kids listen to everything you say…if it is regarding them

I am always reminded of this in the fast few weeks of school. Students often become wistful, and I’ve gotten used to hearing stuff like “Remember when you said [thing I don’t remember saying].” Sometimes it’s funny…other times embarrassing for me. If you ever messed up their name or a biographical detail about them, they’ll remember. On a given day you have one-on-one interactions with dozens, sometimes hundreds of kids. You make lots of choices, and it’s a little harrowing to be reminded that most of those choices are extremely important to the student. The way you treat a student matters so much to them – the most off hand comment can be meaningful. 

A certain amount of students care about the aesthetics of your notes

I intentionally make my notes look, well, spartan. My intention is to make sure there is nothing to distract students from the content.  

Yet every year, students make comments about the sparse presentation of my notes (my mentor teacher my first year at Champe called them “prison slides”).

Last year, I compromised and added a little sparkle to my quarter four notes, adopting a template called “minimalist modern” or something. I maintained that template this year. But it wasn’t enough. The comments endured. I got into it one day with sixth block student Aakanksha. 

“I just don’t see how the aesthetics of my notes affects your learning,” I said.

“Studies actually show that aesthetically pleasing notes can enhance content retention,” Aakansha countered. 

“Show me the research!” I said calmly. “And it better be an actual peer-reviewed study!”  

A few minutes later, Aakanksha sent me the study. 

I also did my own research: 

27% is a large enough portion for me to consider doing something. I also had Aakanksha share with me a sample of a teacher’s notes she considered aesthetically suitable. 

I had planned to have my TAs work on making aesthetically pleasing versions of my notes, which they proposed in their interview this spring… 

I’ll work on doing a better job finding a happy medium between concise and visually enriching.

All students are interesting

Last year, as we discussed the act of writing college essays, I started to argue with students who claimed they were not interesting, that there was no way to spin a meaningful college essay with the raw materials from their life. I was adamant in my stance that they were wrong. I had worked with them a year online and learned so much about their lives — even the students who never turned on their cameras or participated. I was very confident in arguing that they were wrong, that their lives were in fact worthy of an essay. But I couldn’t quite put it into words on the spot. So from there I started to meditate on this concept. I discussed it with my hybrid students, Kai and Leila, and we came up with a list of three principles that make every person interesting:

This does not mean likeable, or moral, or memorable. But all students, all humans, when examined through the combination of these three principles, are interesting. 

The biggest insult you can say to a student is to tell them they will make a good teacher someday

To be fair, there are some amazing kids who are part of the teacher cadet program. For most students, though, it’s a horrible thought. I think most of that can be attributed to teenage malaise, maybe a little anger directed at the place they have spent their formative years…and – who knows – maybe also a little sprinkle of plain ol’ elitism at being part of what, relative to their aspirations, is a low-paying profession.

If you can make it competitive or game-ify it, do it

When I was in high school I had a teacher who had us in groups, and we could earn poker chips for our group throughout the class. I hated it so much. 

But as a teacher, I understand that there will always be more students who enjoy the competition than those who don’t. 

My greatest achievement was the breakout room boxes, wherein groups competed against one another to solve clues and unlock padlocks to get inside the different levels of boxes and hollowed out books, all to ultimately win a prize. It was game-ifying taken to an absurd level. The students loved it. 

If you’re trying to reach students through social media, you’re wasting your time with Twitter

Instagram is where it’s at. If you really want to be with it, use Tik Tok.

Kids hate baseball

If they care about sports, it’s either football or basketball. Hockey is a distant third. Baseball is bringing up the rear. When I bring up the sport, they react with either bemusement (“what is that, again? The sport with the bases?”) or with eye-rolling (it’s so borrrrrring”)

That said, those few students who do care about our national pastime care about it passionately, as in the case of Michael Wilson, recent Champe graduate and the mind behind the very popular @natscoverage_ fan account on instagram. 

Yet baseball is the best metaphor for school

It’s boring, and yet it’s actually really interesting if you invest any amount of time examining it. It’s rich with traditions, some of them nonsensical. Everyone thinks their way was better back in the day. There are 162 games in the MLB regular season; there are 180 days in the school year. The best teams in MLB succeed through shrewd data analysis and putting articulate coaches in the clubhouse who help players reach their highest potential. The mental game of baseball is analogous to the mental stamina required to endure a year in the classroom, never being being too high or too low. Baseball analytics has a mantra of process over outcome — making the correct decisions with a knowledge that it will not ALWAYS turn out in your favor, but if done consistently it will yield more favorable results.   

Linguistically, I find it interesting that a lot of baseball idioms still persist in our daily language (threw a curveball at me…whiffed on that one…struck out…came out of left field). That said, while they persist among us oldsters, I don’t hear students using them. If a student uses an idiomatic expression about sports, it will almost always relate back to basketball (“dunked on” “nothing but net” “brick”)  

One powerpoint for the whole quarter

My first two years at Champe I would create a slideshow for each day’s lesson. Crazy difficult for a student to keep track of. Rolling notes for the quarter are the way to go, with individual lessons for each day linked within it. 

They only know about Marvel movies 

I saw a kid wearing a shirt with the cover of Pulp Fiction. “Great movie,” I said. 

The student had no clue what I was talking about. 

A few weeks later I saw the shirt in Target. Mystery solved.

Their ability to research is only limited by their curiosity

That is to say, while students may not put forth 100% effort in research papers, they will scour every resource possible to find information that interests them. In Lang this year we were analyzing college ads, one of which was an Arizona State spot featuring a student, Ashley, who was interested in joining NASA. “I wonder if she accomplished her goal,” I said. A few minutes later a student raised her hand; somehow, with only the first name, she had found Ashley’s Instagram account (she’s working for NASA btw).

A more concerning example: I once heard a student talking to her friend about the price of her math teacher’s house, which she discovered by searching Zillo and some publicly available transaction records. 

Friends endures 

I enjoy Friends as much as the next guy, but it is strange how, almost two decades later, students still thrill to the adventures of Chandler and Rachel and the rest of the crew. And it’s only Friends that has ascended from the bin of 90s sitcom. Students know nothing about Seinfeld, or Cheers, or Frasier, all of which have been available on Netflix within the past few years. 

Why does it endure? I think it’s a combination of reasons. Friends is funny in an unchallenging way; the people are pretty; and it is set in a fairy-tale NYC with huge apartments and lots of free time for hi-jinks. It has warm and fuzzy themes, and the accessible iconography connects with a bright-eyed high school student. My 2020 PEER students were so pumped to create a parody of the intro:

Friends endures. One of my biggest hot takes that I like to share with students: Ross is the funniest Friend. It’s true.