The Power of Habit

As a teacher, my life is made up of routines.  They get interrupted a lot by pep rallies, senior events, class photos, and the like; but every morning, I come in and get the day ready, make a list, and have a class schedule to follow.  At the beginning of each class, I take attendance, run through what we will do for the period, read a scripture, and pray before getting the class going.  Every Monday afternoon, I have a faculty meeting.  Every Tuesday and Friday morning, I have teacher devotions.  Every day, I let early kids in through the door by my room.  My professional life is filled with habitual behaviors.  Because of that, I used to have very few routines and habits in my personal life.

That was true . . . before lockdown.  

During the lockdown, I applied everything I knew about keeping my brain healthy to my day.  Having a consistent schedule was going to matter more than ever.  Keeping the chaos out of my environment was going to be important.  So, I made a few changes in my life.  While many things got dropped as soon as the case numbers fell, there are some that I have continued to do simply out of habit.

I make the bed every day.  That was not normal for me.  Prior to the spring of 2020, my attitude was that a bed that was good enough to get out of was good enough to get back into, and therefore, did not need to be made.  However, knowing I was going to be home 23 hours out of every day and that I was going to have to pass by my bedroom door every time I went to the bathroom, I knew I wouldn't want it to look chaotic, so I started making the bed just as soon as I got up.  I still do.  As soon as I get out of bed, I turn around and make the bed.  About an hour before going to sleep, I go turn it down.  The nighttime part of this routine makes going to bed nicer.  

I do laundry every Sunday.  Prior to the pandemic, I waited to do laundry until I absolutely had to.  I would wait until the choice was to do laundry or go to Walmart to buy underwear.  When we returned to school in masks, it became important to keep this habit so that I would have clean masks for work.  What I found during the pandemic was that doing such small loads made the task so much easier that I no longer dreaded it.  Putting it off had made it so miserable, and I didn't even know I could prevent that.  Even though I don't need to do it for masks anymore, I have continued to wash that week's laundry because I like how fast folding/hanging the clean laundry has become (and I don't lose as many socks because there are so few to match).

I have Tuesday pants.  This one makes me giggle every time I explain it.  When the lockdowns started, I saw people on Facebook talking about how much they were eating, how they only wore pajama pants, and how much weight they were likely to gain.  I don't own a scale, and I don't want to because I don't think it is psychologically healthy; but I needed a way to know what effect the lockdown was having.  To be fair, I wasn't eating junk food.  (If anything, I might have eaten more healthy than I would be on school days because I was at home preparing it.)  However, I was getting less movement during the day than I would have been if I had been walking around my classroom and down the hall to the teachers' lounge.  What I decided was to choose a pair of pants that I would wear one day every week.  If they got a little tight, I would take a few longer walks.  When we returned to school, I just kept doing it.  So, when you see me wearing red pants on a Tuesday, you will know that those are my Tuesday pants.

There are a few more, including walking to the post office when I have something to mail, watching an episode of Stephen Colbert while I eat dinner and a British game show at some point each day, and doing a crossword puzzle every morning.  I didn't make a decision to keep doing these things.  I was simply in the habit of doing them.  If there is a habit you want to adopt, you just have to start doing it.  Because we don't really embrace change, once you get it into your routine, you will keep doing it without having to make yourself.

What Did You Wish You Had Known?

An educational communicator recently tweeted that he was going to talk to teachers who were about to graduate and asked veteran teachers to reply with what they wished they had known when they were starting out.  While it would overwhelm a new teacher to take in all the years of wisdom and hard-earned professional judgment in those replies, it did make me think how good a book that would make, a little like Harry Wong's The First Days of School, except not exclusive to classroom management techniques.  Someone should do that, but it isn't going to be me, so I'm going to put my two cents here.  Teachers getting ready to start your careers, use it as you will.  

Choosing the Job - You are entering the workforce during a teacher shortage.  That's probably scary, but it also presents an exciting opportunity.  It means you have more options than you might have in other years.  It means you can choose the environment in which you want to work.  When you go in for an interview, don't be afraid to ask if you can spend a day observing classes and chatting with teachers.  See if they'll let you attend a faculty meeting.  Listen to the way the staff interacts with students and with each other.  Listen to the way they talk about their administration.  You want to work in a helpful and joyful school, and that can be hard to know from the interview alone.

Setting Up - If you plan to teach in middle or high school, you aren't going to be much older than your first set of students, so you should do some things to establish authority.  I don't mean that you should go in demanding, mean, or strict.  I do mean that you should communicate the confidence of a person in charge.  Focus on projecting yourself as someone credible and worthy of respect rather than merely likable.  Hang your diploma and teaching certificate behind your desk just like you would expect a doctor, lawyer, or other professional to do.  Post your rules (call them expectations if it makes you feel better).  Communicate your passion for your subject.  It makes kids feel secure if you act like you are confident in your abilities. 

Lesson Planning - I'm going to tell you a secret.  You will never again write a lesson plan as long and detailed as those you wrote for your college methods classes.  That exercise was important to helping you think methodically about your lessons, but all you really need to have is a clear objective, the activities you need to accomplish that objective, and the way you will know when you have accomplished it.  You don't know how long things will take.  I remember planning what I thought was a class period length lesson.  Sometimes, it only took twenty minutes, so you should have some meaningful backup activities (retrieval practice would be my advice - See the book Powerful Teachingˆ by Pooja Agarwal if you don't already know it).  Sometimes, it would take three days.  It will take at least two years before you develop an intuitive feel for how long things take, and that's okay.

Find Some Mentors - You will probably be assigned a mentor by your school.  If you bond with them and they give you valuable advice, that's awesome.  You should also find some teachers with whom relationships develop organically.  You will need advice about replying to a parent's email, dealing with a difficult student, whether it is appropriate to offer extra credit or allow a student to retake a test, to talk through a project idea, to cry with on bad days, and to share your victories with.  I've been teaching for 23 years, and I still need to talk about those things with other teachers.  Find the ones who will tell you the truth and help you figure out your own philosophy (the one they had you write in college was idealistic and didn't cover the details).  Your formal mentor may be helpful, but the teacher next door will be a longer, better source of help.  Asking for help does not make you look weak; it makes you look like a professional who wants to grow in your job, but it is important to find the right people to ask.  If someone starts being a cynical influence, look for someone else.  (This is also true of teachers you find online.  There is a lot of good out there, but there is also a lot of toxicity.  Avoid the cynics, especially right now.)

Figure Out What Can Be Cut - There's a lot to cover in every curriculum, and you will have a time every semester when you realize you cannot cover it all.  Instead of attempting to rush through all of it,  choose to cover fewer things well.  You can choose the things you find the most inspirational, the things that are most foundational to the next level (ask the next level's teachers), or the things you think your students will most enjoy.  You can make that decision differently each year.  There are so many things I tired to fit in the first year I taught physics that I don't bother with now because they just weren't needed.  

Light Days - There are going to be some days when you are just too exhausted to be on top of your game.  Some teachers will advise you to take the day off when that happens.  That might work for you, but it doesn't work for me.  In my experience, writing sub plans is actually harder than being at school.  What you want are a few high-quality class-period-length videos that match your subject (You can find them on YouTube for free).  You are not dropping the ball or being lazy.  You are taking some stress off of your students, allowing them to hear quality material from another source, and giving yourself a chance to catch up on grading and lesson plans.  Have them turn in notes and give them a completion grade for it.  You shouldn't do it often, but if you need it once or twice a semester, don't feel bad about it.

There are many more things I could share here, but the first year is a swirl of advice that's hard to absorb.  Hang in there.  Learn a lot.  Adapt as needed.  You will feel much better after the first year and will really find your groove in year three.  That's when you will want to start taking on clubs, suggesting new classes, or coaching something, but for that first year, just focus on your learning how to be your best self for your students.

Examining Yourself

This week, my school finished our accreditation process.  While the visit from the team lasted only 3 and half days, the process was almost three years long.  And that's what I want to focus on because, while the visit from outside observers is what most people see, it's the lead-up that makes it an important process because it makes us examine ourselves.

The process starts with dividing up into committees and rating ourselves on a number of standards.  From how the school mission and vision statements guide decision-making to instructional practice to assessment to social-emotional development to spiritual formation, all areas of the school are analyzed and rated on a scale of 1 to 4.  Often the difference between a 3 and a 4 is the word "always" or "formal."  We spend a lot of time saying, "Yes, we do this, but do we have a 'formal' process for it?" while deciding on our rating.  

Then, the fun starts.  We can't just rate ourselves without providing evidence for that rating, so we brainstorm ways we might show what we do.  The committees each have a few teachers from various levels, at least one student and at least one parent.  The benefit of that variety is that we get an examination from all sides.  As teachers who love our school, it would be easy for us to romanticize things.  Having a parent in the room to say, "I'm not sure" is helpful in giving ourselves an honest evaluation.  Having a student may give us ideas for evidence we wouldn't have thought of.  Having teachers from a variety of levels gives us a complete view of the child's experience.  Evidence includes everything from pictures of labs and projects to copies of forms to meeting minutes.  The self-examination process is always revealing, and it is mostly encouraging.  I leave those meetings thinking, "Yes, we really are pretty great."  Of course, there are areas we could work on.  As Isaac Asimov said, "Education isn't something you can finish," but going through this process helps us to look at ourselves at a level above the day-to-day and see who we are and what we do.

After all of that is put together, each committee writes their portion of the report, summarizing the ratings and evidence in narrative form and pointing to the evidence folders.  The steering committee pulls them together and polishes them into a cohesive piece, and the report is submitted to the accreditation team.  They read it thoroughly and examine the evidence.  We also provide them access to our curriculum tracking software, our LMS (so they can check lesson plans and get a sense of the student experience), and any other resources they might wish to see.  By the time of the visit, they have a very good idea of what our school is all about.

The self-examination isn't over when the report is written.  When the visiting team arrives, they tour our building, where we have attempted to show our best.  They observe our classes.  They come to a faculty meeting and ask probing questions.  They meet with small groups of students, parents, and administrative staff.  They meet with our board and our administration.  At night, they return to the hotel to write their own report based on everything they have seen in ours and from their observations.  

They don't just accredit or not.  They make recommendations and commendations so that we can continue doing what we do well and work on those things we and they have identified as opportunities for growth.  We were excited to see this time that there were only two major recommendations (one about our facility and one about staff development on addressing social/cultural issues from a Biblical worldview).  There are smaller recommendations as well, but the fact that there were only two majors made us feel pretty confident about what we do and who we are as a school.  

Self-examination like this is at a very high level, but it should be happening at all levels all year.  At GRACE, that looks like an annual professional growth plan meeting with the principal, frequent conversations with department chairs, peer observations to get new ideas, and encouragement to engage in frequent self-reflection.  We want to look at what we do well and where we can improve, not just once every five years when there is a team coming, but always.

Your View Affects Your Thinking

About ten years ago, the city of Raleigh started kicking around a strange idea - banning the sale of residential garbage disposals.  Yes, we are talking about that thing in your sink that grids up food scraps.  Why would anyone want to ban them?  The idea was that they encouraged food waste and that not having them would prevent that.  Ignorant of the fact that there must be food particles in the reservoir for current water cleaning treatments to work, these politicians appealed to the idea that this was environmentally healthy.  While it never ended up happening, the discussions about it on social media were revealing bout one thing.  The side of the issue people came down on was only about whether or not the individual commenting used the one in their house.  "I'm fine with this because nobody uses them anyway" was a frequent comment.  

This attitude that what I do is obviously the norm comes up a lot in our everyday lives.  Several years ago, my students told me that "No one is on Facebook."  At the time, Facebook had more users than Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat combined, but because they weren't on it, the assumption was that no one was. I have a family member, who spends much of his day watching Fox News, and often states kind of fringy ideas as though they are majority opinions.  (You may have the same with a family member who only gets their news from CNN or NPR.)  During a discussion of a potential appearance at the Oscars last week, a man on Twitter said to me, "No one watches them or cares about them anymore."  Granted, their ratings have dropped in the past few years, but they had 11 million in last year's audience, so it isn't true that "no one watches" them.  And given the reaction to The Slap, it is apparently also not true that "no one cares about" them.  I don't watch the Super Bowl, but I'm not naive enough to believe that no one else does.  

I am not saying that the truth of anything is in the middle of the spectrum (although that is true more often than we would like to think).  You may very well be absolutely right, but you have no way to know that if you don't challenge your view by at least listening to the others.  If your worldview can't withstand challenge, then you don't have much belief in it at all.  Listening to other views will often strengthen your own because you have had to defend it.  More information will confirm our thinking if we are correct and change our thinking if we are not.  

Anyone who has travelled comes home with their thinking changed.  Most of the Apollo astronauts came back to become artists, ministers, and/or environmentalists.  This happened because their view of the world had changed.  The primary reason for sending kids on "mission trips" is not necessarily evangelism or missions; it is to give them a view of poverty in order to change their perspective on need.  Chanigng your view need not require the expense of travel.  Reading books written by people from other cultures can do it as well.  I have often referenced the book The Lightless Sky as a book that "will not let me go" because I can never think about refugees in the same way.  It is one thing to have an opinion formed from my own experience, but reading from the perspective of another changed my opinion because I was viewing it from a different angle.  

If we don't allow for the idea our view is limited, we will be likely to assume anyone who thinks differently from us is not just wrong, but evil.  (It's how conspiracy theories get traction.)  We assume that they are lying rather than describing things from a view we cannot see.  This comic represents the idea well.  

This isn't just a rant.  It's about teaching.  Our students (by virtue of their age) have a limited view of the world, and it is our job to open up their view.  When they make a blanket statement that we know comes from their limited view, we should confront them.  It doesn't mean being rude or haughty or mean; it can be as simple as "Have you heard of this?" because you know they probably haven't.  It is our job to help them to become more mature humans, and we don't do that by being afraid to challenge their thinking.  We should also model that by telling them how our perspective on something has changed.  My favorite example is my changed outlook on Wikipedia, but there are others.  If we are afraid to tell them when we have changed our view because of something we have learned, we can't expect them to do it either.  It isn't age that opens our view; it is learning.  Let's give them a view of different cultures, thoughts, ideas, life experiences, etc. through our conversations with them.