My cousin, a state dairy inspector, can look at a Holstein for one minute and accurately assess the cow’s age, health, and profitability. I have acquired a slightly different skill: I can look at a student for one second and tell if he or she is going to ask me for a letter of recommendation.  

I’ve gained the skill through experience. This fall has been filled with requests, mostly from my former AP Language and Composition. They smile nervously, make brief attempts at pleasantries. Then they broach the question,  always with the exact same phrasing: “So…I was wondering…”. They drag out the ellipses, most unable to even finish the question, as if they’re asking me for something outrageous, like a car loan or a kidney.      

To them, the prospect of writing an essay that outlines their strengths is a nightmarish task. As talented as my students are, they often struggle with identifying and writing meaningfully about what makes them unique and commendable. It’s tough as a teenager to be objective about yourself. It’s made more difficult now that they spend so much time using social media to set unrealistic expectations for themselves. For me, though, it’s (almost) never a problem to write positively about a former student. My answer to their requests is (almost) always an unequivocal yes — after which the student thanks me and leaves. I then add the student’s name to the spreadsheet of letter requests. 

After that, all that’s left is the writing of the letter. Like I said, it’s usually easy to think of reasons that make a student commendable. Sometimes, though, I get frustrated by the unknown aspect of writing letters of rec. When I write anything — an email, a text message, a blog post — I try to be mindful of my audience. What do I need to write to achieve my purpose? How do I get what I want? What will be the effect of my words? As I’ve worked my way through my spreadsheet of names this fall, I’ve been frustrated by the letter of rec’s effect, or rather the ambiguity of its effect. Compared to most forms of writing, they exist in a vacuum, read by an unresponsive audience. I’ll never know how closely my letter was read by an admissions officer — or if it was even read at all. I’ll never know how much a student’s acceptance or rejection is due to me. Sometimes it feels like shouting compliments into the void. It’s a selfish impulse, but I want to know how much my effort mattered. If anything, it could help give me direction in writing future letters.  

I received some guidance this week after speaking with Matt Kaberline, an English teacher at Freedom High School whose prior experience as an admissions officer for Regis College and University of Mary Washington gives him plenty of authority on the genre. We were both attending a professional development session on Turnitin this Thursday in Ashburn. During a break I asked him straight up how much a letter of rec really mattered.  

“It can make or break a student’s application,” he said. He described how admissions officers representing different regions often have to fight for their bubble candidates, students who aren’t an easy “yes” or “no”. The letters of rec were often a deciding factor in the final decision.  

So what makes an effective letter? Talking with Matt has helped guide my writing process. When I asked him what they really wanted from a letter of rec, he described it simply. “How different is this class when the student is there, and how different is it when the student is not there?” he said. For me this emphasized the value of identifying a student’s interpersonal skills and character, something that can’t be assessed from a GPA or SAT score. Sometimes I want to brag about how smart a student is, but as much as possible I need to consider their interaction with their peers and contributions to the class environment as well. A college has access to plenty of data in an application, but they rely on letters of rec (as well as the student’s own writing) for a clearer picture of who this student is and whether they would be a valuable addition. 

The good news is that most of my students are ambitious in their college choices, and while my letter may not factor at all into their acceptance to their safety school, it may play a role in the deliberation of their dream school. That’s incentive enough for me to stop worrying so much about my letter’s effect and simply focus on writing a clear and coherent portrait of what made my student stand out in my classroom.    

Tuesday was a red-letter day for John Champe’s section of Positive Experiences in Education Relationships (PEER), a class that aims to promote positivity at our school through student mentoring, as well as larger whole-school functions. This month, for example, we’ll be putting on several different events centered around Unity Day, a national day of anti-bullying and pro-inclusion, which we commemorate (thanks to the help of Sources of Strength) with unity chains and a fall tailgate during all lunches with pumpkin painting, cider, and cornhole.  

Since taking over as faculty sponsor last fall, I’ve learned a lot about the variables that go into making a whole-school activity successful. By “successful”, I mean an event or initiative that positively affects a large (10% of the student body or greater) and diverse segment of the student population. To achieve this, you have to balance time-management, planning, budget (anything that involves the whole school usually has a cost somewhere), and buy-in from the PEER students themselves. Some initiatives strike a better balance than others with these factors.  

It seems pretty obvious in retrospect, but hosting a meet-and-greet with therapy dogs was a gigantic success, the type of success that made me wonder why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. 

First of all, it wasn’t my idea. The idea came from interviewing students in the spring who wanted to join PEER. I asked students in their application to suggest ideas for activities that would promote positivity at Champe. One application contained a suggestion to bring therapy animals each month for students with anxiety. I liked the idea, but I had no idea how difficult it would be to see through, or how interested students would be. This month I decided to find out. 

I called Heeling House, a Sterling-based non profit. They were immediately receptive to arranging a meet-and-greet with a team of therapy dogs. We corresponded by email a few more times to lock down a date.   

The PEER students did their part to promote the event, creating a digital poster with Canva and advertising it on the requisite social media platforms. We soon realized that promotion wasn’t going to be a huge issue: my PEER students reported a high level of interest in the event. 

This proved true as soon as the dogs arrived on Tuesday. As their owners registered in the office, wide-eyed students rushed through the doors muttering barely intelligible exclamations of delight: “ohhhh wooow can I pet him?…Why are there dogs here?…Heey what’s your name?”

Finally we retreated to our designated space outside the cafeteria. The PEER students helped with crowd control, inviting different segments of the cafeteria at different times to come outside and visit the pups. During the first lunch block I stood with Ramy, a PEER junior, admiring the mix of students enjoying the therapy pups. The dogs themselves were often barely visible, surrounded by a mass of admirers. “This is pretty successful,” Ramy observed. 

It was indeed, and in the wake of its success I took away a few lessons. The first was to never underestimate teenagers’ fascination with cute animals. I think animals in general are always a popular novelty, even if they aren’t necessarily cute, or even invited. (I remember my tenth grade history class being distubed by a squirrel that poked his head out of a hole in the drop ceiling. The student who saw the rodent screamed and pointed. We were all familiar with this animal. We saw them every day. Yet we accomplished nothing else in class that day.) I have an ornery Betta fish in my classroom that always draws a few concerned students checking on him every day.

The second lesson was that an event does not have to be elaborately organized or funded to be successful in raising morale at a school. Thanks to the generous volunteer efforts of our therapy dogs’ trainers, John Champe was a more positive environment on Tuesday. All it took was a student’s idea, a few phone calls, and a team of relaxed pups.

This is a transcript of a speech I gave at Winchester Toastmasters 9772 a few years ago…

In the spring of 2014 I became obsessed with an intellectual challenge: baking the perfect apple pie. 

It all started the year prior. I was watching the Apple Blossom parade in Winchester, and I saw in the parade a convertible that, according to the signage, held the winner of that year’s apple pie baking contest.

I was amused, and I was also very jealous. I resolved that next year I would win the apple pie baking contest, and I would ride in the parade. I had no experience baking an apple pie, but I figured that if I gave myself two months to prepare and did my research, with the appropriate growth mindset, I would be more prepared than any of the other fair-weather bakers I assumed would be my primary competition.   

A few days later, after baking my first pie, I realized what a challenge I faced. I had the rule sheet for the pie baking contest, which dictated that you must prepare everything from scratch in the span of an hour — nothing could be premade. It was early March on a snowy morning. The pie I had baked was fine, delicious even, but it was not a prize-winning pie. There was nothing exceptional about this pie. I set to work studying cookbooks and seeking out lifelong pastry veterans. The first aspect I had to improve was my crust.

The crust is what drives many home chefs from preparing pies. It’s messy and easy to screw up. You have to blend flour and fat, either butter or lard or crisco, then you add just enough cold water to bind these elements together. Use too much cold liquid, and you have a soppy mess that will be chewy and tough when it comes out of the oven. If you don’t use enough cold liquid, you end up with a dry blob that comes apart when you touch it. I quickly learned that the savvy chef no longer uses cold water, but instead goes with something much harder: liquor. It makes a difference because alcohol does not activate the gluten protein in the flour the same way water does. Therefore, after the pie is out of the oven and the alcohol has burned off, you have a flakier crust. The higher the alcohol content, the better. I used chilled Virginia Gentlemen bourbon, an appropriate choice because of its name and its cheapness.The other secret to a fine crust is to use a high quality butter, and use a lot of it. For each of my pies I used half a pound of Kerrygold, a fancy Irish brand found in the specialty dairy section of Costco. I spared no expense — greatness was worth the extra money.      

During the month of April, I focused more on what makes a perfect apple pie filling. The spice mix is simple: cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar. The problem was that at the contest I knew I would be given one hour of time in a convection oven at 375 degrees. With this in mind, I tried to prepare the right combination of apple slices for that environment. At first I was convinced that finely sliced apples were the way to go, since they would cook faster and have an interesting texture. What I learned through trial and error, though, was that what mattered most was not how you slice the apples, but how many you use. If you use seven apples, it’s going to take longer to cook than if you use four apples. 

Now, let’s take a minute to discuss what apples to use. I am fortunate to live in the capital of the apple world. The appital, if you will. While nothing beats the flavor a Fuji, the texture of a Granny Smith is sublime. These models may be a little more expensive, but they are worth every penny. After several weeks of experimentation, I determined that you needed to use four apples, sliced longways. An hour in the oven at 375 and they would be beautifully cooked. With so few apples, the pie would be as level, as level as the temperament of a third-generation orchard owner. It would also be delicious.   

So I had determined how to make an amazing crust. I had figured out the best mix for a satisfying filling. What I had to learn now was how to make a pie that was visually appealing. My first pie was about as visually appealing as a car wreck. I had a lot of work to do. The first thing I endeavored to learn was the classic lattice technique. While I’m not particularly coordinated or crafty, the over-under-pattern did not present a huge challenge. What was difficult, though, was the outer crust. I did not want to do a fork mashed crust, or a thumb indented crust. Those looked…too basic, to use a word popular with the kids. First I learned an easy way to make a crust that looked like a rope, but how appetizing is a rope? No — what I wanted was a braided crust, and I wanted braids that were so elaborate and gorgeous they wouldn’t look out of place in an Anglo Saxon treasure chest.

But I didn’t know how to braid. For this I turned to my wife, who very patiently showed me how to take three pieces of string and wrap them into a flowing unit. Easy enough to learn with three pieces of string, but to do this with three pieces of dough — composed of butter and flour and booze — was not a simple task. I spent weeks making my pies, practicing and practicing. By the time late April arrived, I could consistently bake a pie that had a golden lattice face and braided crust, and an inside that was gooey and delicious and full of rich apple flavor. Most would be happy to bake a pie this good once in their life. I was churning them out three times a week in preparation for this contest. Because I had a goal: I wanted to win. Any time I became frustrated by a set back, I closed my eyes and imagined standing at the top of the heap, riding in the apple pie convertible. 

A week later, I stood in the social hall of Marker Miller Orchard. I had made my pie exactly how I wanted, and I was waiting, along with twenty other adults and seven kids, to hear who was the winner. 

I saw no pies that were as elaborate as mine, no pies that had been as thoughtfully prepared. I waited as the judges tasted the other pies, and I tried to imagine how I would act in the parade. Would I wave my hand like a pageant girl? Would I wink smuggly at the crowd? A TV crew from Harrisonburg was present to interview the winner. At one in the afternoon, the owner of Marker Miller Orchard stood before us and solemnly read the name of first place. It was not me. I wasn’t even close. I finished in the middle. The judges had tasted my pie and decided it was mediocre. The award instead went a Winchester socialite. Her daughter — in an amazing coincidence — won the children’s round. They would ride in the convertible together during the parade. 

I knew as I drove away from the orchard that I could take this experience two ways. I could accept defeat graciously and vow to return next year. Or I could say what I felt in my heart: the Marker Miller Apple Pie Contest is rigged so that a blonde Winchester socialite and her little blonde daughter can ride in the parade, and my pie was the by far the best there, and I will never compete in the contest ever again. Which is exactly what I said to anyone who would listen to me, and that is the message I would like to leave you with tonight. Thank you. 

Every year a few nondescript nouns or adjectives take on new meaning to our nation’s youth. Out of a cocoon of context (rap lyrics, memes, in-jokes), these slang words are hatched into the air, wild-colored with new meaning, elusive to the comprehension of adults, traveling through our hallways and classrooms (sometimes even make an appearance in essays). When one drifts into my reach, I follow the connoisseur’s protocol: capture and categorize. 

In writing this, I have avoided the very helpful urbandictionary.com. My goal is to taxonomize these words and phrases based on my students’ specific usage, which may have regional distinctions.  

Here are three recent specimens from the past month.

 

“Tough” 

Part of speech: Adjective 

Definition: Stylishly pleasing  

Used in a sentence: “That Lambo looks tough.” 

Related slang: “Fly”, “Hot”, “Sick”

First encountered: First week of school, from numerous students.  

Will this slang still be used in a year? I doubt it. It simply repackages a common sentiment. It will fall out of favor with over-usage, like anything concerned with style.

 

“Drip”  

Part of speech: Noun 

Definition: a combination of fancy clothing (bling) and combustible rhetoric (fire), causing a subsequent “thaw”. 

Used in a sentence: “I just can’t compete with Theodore. He simply has that drip.”  

Related slang: “Swag,” “Ice”

First encountered: During the beginning-of-the-year student presentations. One student brought a necklace of significant emotional value. A fellow student deemed the necklace as a contributing factor in the student’s drip.   

Will this slang still be used in a year? Yes. This one has staying power, both in its sincere and ironic usage.  

 

“No cap” 

Part of speech: Adverb clause 

Definition: being said with sincerity. 

Used in a sentence: “That test was really difficult, no cap.” 

Related slang: “For real”, “No lie”

First encountered: Yesterday in class. A student used the phrase to describe an assignment’s difficulty. After consulting the rest of the class to make sure the student wasn’t making up the phrase, I asked the students to explain its origins. After a summary dismissal of this request (“That’s such an English teacher question”) they explained it involves the respectful removal of a hat. I am skeptical of this explanation: what student in America refers to hats as caps? 

Will this slang still be used in a year? It will indeed, no cap! 

Sometimes I think about the evolution of education. When that happens I invariably think about my aunt Francis, the only teacher I’ve ever known who used corporal punishment.

Aunt Francis graduated with a degree in 1935 from the Richmond division of William & Mary, a school that went on to become what is now VCU. She taught in Central Virginia for over thirty years. A childhood survivor of polio, Francis had a badly disfigured left ankle and shortened leg as a result of the disease. Her custom shoes compensated for this unevenness with fat three-inch soles. The shoes were one of the few ways to tell her apart from her twin, Sally. They both outlived their husbands by several decades and enjoyed their senior years babysitting grandkids, reading stacks of romance novels, watching The Price is Right, and eating lunch thriftily at the hospital cafeteria. Francis, who had a bleaker sense of humor than her sister, once said that she woke up listening to the local news on the radio every morning. “I wait to hear the obituaries, and if I don’t hear my name announced, I get out of bed.”      

She stood a slight 5’1”, weighed approximately 110 pounds, and taught middle school (mostly sixth grade) most of her teaching career, which ended in the seventies. She enforced discipline in her class with a paddle. It was common practice — I’m not sure if was termed “best practice” — to have some form of physical discipline in your classroom in American public school classrooms during the first half of the 20th century. It didn’t have to be a paddle, though. When he was caught in the act of cheating on a spelling test, my uncle had a pencil smashed over his head, breaking it in two (the pencil, not my uncle’s head). 

In other classrooms, knuckles were slapped with rulers. Noncompliant ears were pulled. Knees were swatted with switches. These practices, which Horace Mann called “a relic of barbarism” all the way back in 1800s, have been expunged from most of our public schools – but not all of them. Corporal punishment still remains legal in 19 states.      

It was legal during most of Aunt Francis’s teaching career, and she made prolific use of her paddle. In fact, we know the names of everyone who she paddled, because she had a curious routine of tracking her discipline, which was another common practice during its time, from what I understand. After discipline had been meted out, she would make the punished student sign the instrument of their punishment:

Over her career Aunt Francis amassed a collection of paddles, all filled with the shaky signatures of impertinent sixth graders.  This particular paddle was custom-made by a student of Aunt Francis. He brought it to her a day after her previous paddle had been broken — on him. 

I keep the paddle on display in my classroom as a conversation starter and a tribute to my family’s roots in education. It also is the inspiration for my lectern, which I let students sign when they have a moment of significant achievement. 

It’s at the other end of the emotional spectrum, a positive reward as opposed to a punishment. While educational philosophies evolve, the human element remains the same. Former students would visit my Aunt Francis years later as adults to try and find their name on one of her paddles. I hope students return to see their name on my lectern. 

Back in the spring I added an exciting addition to my classroom: a word-of-the-day tear-away calendar I purchased for seventy-five percent off from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I placed it near the tissue box — reading material for the nose-blowers. It quickly became part of my morning routine to tear away to the next entry and read the day’s bit of vocab. For a while I was content. 

Then came the later weeks of May. A stretch of several meaningful classes remained, but my activities were slowed by spotty attendance and even spottier student motivation. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary or unexpected (who isn’t worn out after weeks of SOLs, APs, and final projects?), but I was not satisfied. I always teach my students that the most memorable part of a sentence is the end — and I think this principle is true for the time spent with someone. First impressions matter, but those last interactions linger the longest. I had enjoyed my year with these students, and I didn’t want to end the year on such a weak note.  

As I pondered this problem one morning, I had an idea. What if my students contributed to my very own personalized tear-away calendar? If each of my students created two entries, I’d have more than enough entries for the 180 school days. 

I created a template on Google docs that gave a student three tasks: a word of the day , a historical fact of the day (preferably related to English class), and a poem/fable/koan of the day. I asked the students to note their name at the bottom. To better facilitate their search for truly obscure words I required them to use actual hard-cover dictionaries instead of their Chromebooks.

After explaining the activity I approached each student with a clipboard and a 2019/2020 calendar. Each student was in charge of two days: one day was assigned by me and one day they were allowed to claim for themselves if it was available. I did make the assignment work points, as I suspected a deep abiding affection for my class and this project would not be sufficient motivation.   

As with all end-of-the-year assignments, some were completed more diligently than others.

For me, though, the biggest challenge was printing and assembling it. One hundred and eighty individual documents take a long time to send to the printer. And because I let students choose a date for themselves, they did not print in chronological order. When I was done with the printing, I had a mass of jumbled months and days.  

And speaking of mass — this thing was hefty. When fully assembled, my student-created tear-away calendar was a monstrosity, weighing ten times as much as its tiny little pad-sized inspiration. I’d need to drill into the cinder-block if I wanted to hang it. 

The organization was easy to solve: I simply presented the assemblage of unorganized papers to my most fastidious student, who was visibly shaken by the disorder. Fifteen minutes of furious scrambling later, order was achieved.  

As for the weight issue, I simply hang a month worth of entries at a time with the help of Command strips. 

Now I have a much more fulfilling morning ritual. The information is broader, for one. Not only do I get to add a new word to my lexicon, but also a historical fact to note, and a poem to savor. Then there’s added plus of noting the student’s name in the bottom left corner and reflecting on their contributions.

I have a tendency to quickly forget. I’ve found this to be a great way to keep alive the memory of an outstanding year. If I see the student in the hallway during the day their entry is up, I’ll make them come in my classroom to appreciate it, much to their delight and appreciation.

For now, I am content. It’s a project that gives me great satisfaction, and I plan to do it again in those lackluster final school days of the early summer. 

English teacher Kelly Gallagher stirred the pot last week: 

Our nation’s youth refer to this as “shade”. As the day progressed, more and more educators responded to the influential education writer’s online observation. While it didn’t turn into a full-on ratio-ing, the tweet sparked a lively debate in the mentions about how much dressing up for the job really matters… 

I don’t think there’s much to debate about the professionalism of the tweet: criticizing a coworker on a public platform is unprofessional and petty, and it’s behavior I can’t remember ever seeing from Gallagher as long as I’ve followed him on Twitter.   

But I’m not here to drag Gallagher. I’m here to stand in solidarity with my grumpy and well dressed fellow English teacher. Male teachers should dress well. Unless they teach shop or phys ed, they should make it habit to come to work wearing a tie — or at least an unwrinkled collared shirt, which they should tuck in. Doing so benefits not just the teacher’s students, but also his profession — and ultimately himself.   

A teacher who expects intellectual growth from his students should create the most hospitable classroom environment for that growth. Students should feel respected and valued. A nonverbal way to communicate these emotions to students is to dress well. On one level, it’s a small act of solidarity with the students, who often must conform to a dress code themselves. But in a more subtle way, it has the ability to help set the tone on the first day. After all, don’t we dress well for a job interview to establish a sense of decorum with the skeptical interviewer, to establish that you’re competent enough to value the seriousness of the occasion? Isn’t a class of teenagers often just as skeptical as any job interviewer? In my opinion, dressing professionally is one way to convince students that you do in fact have something of value to share with them and deserve to be taken seriously. It’s not some cure-all for establishing respect and rapport, but it’s part of the foundation. During my student-teaching we were required to wear ties and jackets every day, no exceptions. It was an extreme mandate, but I learned to appreciate it more during my high school placement, where I taught students who at the time were only a few years younger than me. Wearing a tie doesn’t give you super powers, but it does offer a very practical differentiation between you and the students.       

The benefits of dressing well extends not just to the students, but to our entire profession. When teachers struggle with lawmakers, the conversation is always — implicitly or explicitly — about respect. Dressing well is commonly accepted indicator of the respect you hold for your job. And really — aren’t most of the professions that uphold our society rooted in a sartorial customs? Nurses have scrubs. Doctors have white jackets. Police officers, airline pilots, Starbucks baristas — they all wear some sort of uniform that for them is a point of pride. The first teachers in America were Puritans robed in joyless (but always stylish) black. Since then, our profession has become much richer with personality, but it still deserves respectful attire. Social media makes it a necessity. A teacher wearing shorts and flip flops may command the respect of his class, but what about those who view a picture of him on Twitter looking so casual? That’s not to mention the parents who visit the school and interact with teachers on a day-to-day basis. Not dressing “like crap” is a simple way to show a unified message to outsiders.     

The reasons to dress well aren’t all outward; there are also psychological benefits. The Scientific American published a blog post that examined a recent study about this concept: “A paper in August 2015 in Social Psychological and Personality Science asked subjects to change into formal or casual clothing before cognitive tests. Wearing formal business attire increased abstract thinking—an important aspect of creativity and long-term strategizing. The experiments suggest the effect is related to feelings of power.” Although the subjects in the study weren’t teachers, many of the skills described are applicable to life in the classroom. We spend much of the day giving instructions, negotiating (with students, parents, coworkers), and engaged in abstract thinking. If dressing well is a small way to improve these faculties, why should we be resistant to it? It doesn’t have to be overly complicated or fussy: President Obama famously limited his fashion choices while on the job to gray or black suits, as he had too many other decisions to make throughout the day. A teacher’s job may not carry the same immediate gravity as a politician’s, but there are certainly a lot of decisions to make each day. If dressing well can improve mindset and, by extension, performance, it becomes less of a fashion statement and more of an obligation. 

Obviously there isn’t a one-to-one correlation between professional dress and success as a teacher, which I think is part of the reason Gallagher’s “just sayin” tweet garnered so many heated replies. We’ve all had or worked with teachers who possessed quirks that made them memorable and effective, if a little eccentric. There are some areas where I err on the side of tradition, and this one place. (I’m also traditional about the concept of minding my own business.) But’s it’s a small facet in the scheme of things. The highest measure of teacher, male or female, isn’t how he/she dresses for picture day — it’s whether they’re making a full effort for the students. That’s a quality that surpasses the wardrobe. 

This year I’m trying to be more conscious about student names — remembering them, pronouncing them, appreciating the subtleties. And does it ever get subtle: I have one class with three students whose names are similar enough to easily confuse. It doesn’t help that they are sitting close together. Nearby sit two students with names that are also very easy to interchange. My goal is to get them right, not out of any sort of perfectionist tendency, but because I’ve learned that this is one important area to create a fast rapport.  

This might seem like an obvious lesson, but it wasn’t for me. I always assumed students were easy-going about teachers botching their names at the beginning of the year. In the past, I did my best, and even prided myself on knowing my students’ names by the end of the first week. I made a few slip ups, but that’s life, right? 

Then, on the last day of school this past June, one of my best students reflected with me about one thing I did that annoyed her. It happened on the very first day of class. 

“You were calling role and you got to my name on the roster. You paused and said, ‘I’m sorry if I butcher this.’” 

I did indeed butcher her name, which she then corrected, and which I proceeded to pronounce properly the rest of the year. 

I had no memory of ever messing up her name. For me, calling role at the beginning of our first class was just part of the stressful first days of school. For her, though, it was one of the defining moments in the class.   

The story stuck with me. Over the summer I pondered why our students can’t empathize a bit with teachers in that area. Everyone is trying their best, and sometimes mistakes happen. Give someone a hundred and twenty names to read and they’re going to make some mistakes. What’s hard to understand about that? The student I offended on the first day had one of the most thoughtful and perceptive minds I taught all year. Why did that one incident mean so much to her? 

Eventually I reached the conclusion that no student wants to hear a butchered version of his/her name — even if it’s a name the student claims to hate. I reached this conclusion partly by way of an experience with my own name.  

Recently I encountered a man. The only important thing to know about him is that we had met and interacted a few times prior. I was not a stranger. He looked me up and down, pointed at me skeptically. 

“Jason?” he asked. 

I shook my head. 

“I called you Jason last time, didn’t I?” he asked. 

“I don’t know,” I said. Which was a lie. I did know: he had called me Jason. And I had corrected him then.     

Was I annoyed? Deeply. I discarded any opportunity for empathy (I do have a…generic name) and instead glared at this man as he tried to make amends. How dare he disgrace me? 

We assign value to our names. To show attention to student names is to recognize their value.

This year, before calling role for the first time, I have students complete an online survey. As they work, I mover around the room, quietly say each student’s name to them, and make any pronunciation corrections on my roster as needed.  

I attended a training a few years ago where the session leader said that a teacher should always seek as much as possible to make a student look good in front of his/her peers. Mangling her name did not make my student look good. I didn’t remember that one beginning-of-the-year mispronunciation because I wasn’t the one being embarrassed. 

At my old job, where I taught much smaller classes in an alternative school setting, I was ending class one day and talking with my students about the upcoming week. There was a lot to discuss, as I was planning to be gone for a few weeks for my son’s birth. 

There was a student sitting at the front of the class. She had long dirty-blonde dreadlocks, thick glasses, and always wore tie dye shirts. She never spoke in class, and it was always a struggle to keep her head up. 

As I was talking with my other students about who the sub might be and how long I would be out, this student sat up in her desk, parted her dreads, and glared at me for a minute. 

“Do you have a name?” she muttered.  

All the other students stopped talking, stared at her for a moment, then looked at me. It was the first time she’d shown any interest in interacting with me. I felt a sudden existential crisis. How do you respond to such an elemental, downright obvious question. I tried to empathize with her, but boy was it difficult. After all, I was wearing a work ID with my name right there! 

I took a deep breath.     

“My name,” I said very slowly. “My name…is Mr. Scott.”  

She rolled her eyes. “No! For your kid.” She’d been listening the whole time. 

I don’t remember how the rest of that conversation went, and ironically enough, I don’t even remember her name. For as much as I try to value them while they’re in my class, I have a tough time hanging onto names once the student is gone.  

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.     

This year the John Champe English department will be reading and discussing Workshopping the Canon. I’m excited to learn Mary E. Styslinger’s approach to teaching and supplementing classic texts; last year in AP Language & Composition, I taught several canonical American works. Since it was my first time teaching the course, I tried to keep data on students’ satisfaction with different works. What follows is an analysis of that feedback.

I was inspired to teach texts from the American canon by my AP Summer Institute instructor, who claimed to teach ten classic American texts during her course each year. Her students didn’t read the book at all in class and there were no lessons attached to the books. She would give a (very difficult) test at the end of the novel, then hold a Socratic discussion the next class. The point was to increase students’ reading stamina (especially works 19th century and later) and increase their scope of literary references they could use on the test. I entered the school year in August 2018 ready to adopt this model.

During the fall semester my colleague and I assigned four books: The Catcher in the Rye, Puddin’head Wilson, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Great Gatsby. At the conclusion of each work (once the test and Socratic were complete), I asked students in each class (a total of 52 students) to offer their anonymous opinion about how they enjoyed the work, using the AP measuring-stick of 1 to 9, with 9 being the best.

The average rating for J.D. Salinger’s ode to the horrors of being a teenager was 6.333, with a median score of 7. During the Socratic discussion, most students indicated that they were pleasantly surprised at how much they enjoyed the book and sympathized with Holden. Close to a quarter of students were not as charmed. Overall, I was optimistic about the experience. My colleague and I decided to challenge our students with the next work, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson.

They hated it. Students gave Twain’s comic tale of mistaken identities an average score of 4.2, with a median of 3. During the Socratic, a minority of students said they enjoyed it much more than Catcher, and throughout the year would single it out as their favorite work. But most of them hated it. And while their distaste in the book was pretty unified, their reasons were varied: the plot was corny, the dialogue was difficult to understand, the narrator was ponderous. I think part of their ire was due to time-management: many waited until the weekend before the test to cram the whole book, and many were thrown off by Pudd’nhead’s intricate plot and considerable cast of characters. I should mention that our test asked students to identify quotes from the book, who is speaking, to whom they were speaking, and the significance of the quote itself. Judging from the test scores, they did indeed read the book. They just didn’t like it.

I read the novella for the first time that summer, and I was truly surprised at the overwhelmingly negative response. I told my students to be happy I hadn’t assigned Huck Finn. Then again, I wonder if they would have found that much closer to Catcher in the voice of the narrator, the unpredictable unspooling of the plot as Huck and Jim travel along the river.

My colleague and I decided to pivot to theater.

A perfect play for a class focused on the art of rhetoric, A Raisin in the Sun was received much more warmly than its predecessor. My students scored Lorraine Hansberry’s play an average of 6.66 with a median of 7, slightly higher numbers than Catcher. While I told students to base their rating solely on their experience reading the work, not the length (it can be pretty easily read in one sitting), I’m pretty sure some liked it for its relative brevity. That said, the Socratic discussions for this book were particularly enriching. Very few students at Champe are lifelong residents of Loudoun County. They found much to identify in the characters’ struggles to play nice in that cramped apartment, the questioning of racial identity, the lengths one will go in pursuit of a dream.

We continued that theme of dream-seeking with our next book.

For this survey I only received forty responses — I must have given it close to a holiday when I had a lot of students absent. The responses I have, though, offer a pretty compelling case for Gatsby’s persistence in the American canon: my students gave Fitzgerald’s extremely relatable novella about rich Ivy League graduates traipsing around post-World War I Long Island an average score of 6.66 with a median of 7.

I blame the movie. I think the scores would be much lower if students didn’t have the DiCaprio film to guide them and color their perception of the themes. I’m ambivalent about Gatsby’s vaunted status in the canon. But you can’t argue with success; the Socratics for this book were passionate and engaging, students investing a lot of emotion in the merits of Daisy, Tom, and the rest of the gang.

That was the final book we read as a whole class. During the spring semester our three books were lit circles — memoirs, issue books, and classic American novel. Students wrote analysis papers in place of a reading test, and created presentations in place of whole-class Socratics. The out-of-class papers were especially productive in boosting student performance on their in-class timed writes. This year we will probably follow a similar model for most of out-of-class reading. I have respect for the methods of my AP summer instructor, but for what we have to accomplish, with the classes of our size, you have to prioritize the workload you place on your students (and yourself).

I have an open mind about what books we should teach, how we should teach them, and why we should teach them. One of my biggest arguments for reading classic texts is to have as full a view of our culture as possible. Just as skills are progressively built upon in science and math, a healthy appreciation of literature, I believe, requires a sturdy foundation in the classics. A book doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Modern works often reference and comment, implicitly or explicitly, on works that came before it. And while not all classic texts are going to touch your soul, at the very least it should cause you to ask the question: what made this a classic, and why is still considered a canonical text?

I hope Workshopping the Canon will provide extra support for providing students with a fulfilling reading experience in my class.