Why Can’t the Whole Year Be Like the First Day of School?

Why Can’t the Whole Year Be Like the First Day of School?

Two weeks ago, I started a new position as an English Language Arts Instructional Specialist after years of teaching English, Humanities, and/or AVID at Shepton High School. Consequently, Monday was the first first day of school since 1993 that I was not standing up in front of a roomful of teenagers with whom I would spend the next 180 or so days.  Instead, I spent most of the day visiting five middle or high schools around the district, meeting some teachers, and tracking down everyone I’m supposed to support at those schools.

As I stepped in and out of classrooms and walked through the halls, I noticed a few things that seem to be generally true about middle school and high school students and teachers on the first day of school:

• Nearly everyone looks excited to be there.
• Students are eager to please, want to succeed, and are willing to make an effort.
• Teachers are polite, patient, and well-rested.
• Students don’t mind asking adults for help, and the adults don’t seem to mind being helpful.
• The teachers are prepared and organized. So are the students.
• The classrooms are full, but the hallways aren’t.
• No one is failing.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if most or all of these things were still true in May? I realize that is a Pollyannaish idea, but it’s worth considering. Here are a few thoughts about what teachers might do to make this “schooltopia” a reality:

Nearly everyone looks excited to be there.

My buzzword for the school year is “joy”—so much so that my coworkers keep jokingly asking me “Where’s the joy?” if they happen to catch me with a furrowed brow. I’ve been urging teachers at back-to-school inservices to make their classrooms joyful places for students. “How do I do this?” you may ask: Share your love for your subject. Enjoy the exploration with your students. Laugh. Play. If you’re not having fun, I’m pretty sure your students aren’t either. Find the joy in what you have to teach, and it’ll make coming to class easier for you and for the students.

Students are eager to please, want to succeed, and are willing to make an effort.

In an inspirational and hilarious TED Talk, Rita Pierson said, “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” They will, however, keep working for a teacher who likes them and believes in them, even when the work gets more challenging.  Although Machiavelli in The Prince suggests that an effective leader strive to be feared rather than loved, I’m not sure that’s the best advice for teachers. Though students may work in a classroom with a climate of fear, they won’t be excited to be there, and they won’t do anything more than required. You can’t make teenagers like you, but you can let them know you like them, which makes it much harder to dislike you in return.    

Teachers are prepared and organized.  So are the students.

Even Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip had an organized binder and a clutter-free backpack on the first day of class. When students have their time and materials organized, they are primed for success. Help your students with organization, the O in WICOR, by providing them with structures for calendaring and keeping up with assignments and classwork. When teachers are prepared and organized, the classes run more smoothly, more learning occurs, teachers are calmer, and there are fewer disciplinary issues because lessons move seamlessly from one activity to the next, giving students no down time to cause trouble or get bored. Also, calm teachers are happy teachers, which makes them infinitely more tolerant and patient. 

Teachers are polite, patient, and well-rested.

You may be the only adult in a student’s life who reacts to the world in an adult manner. Show students how to treat others through your actions. Handle conflicts and disciplinary issues with logic and maturity. Take care of yourself. Get plenty of rest. Breathe more often than you think you need to.  When we get stressed and overwhelmed, we become less patient and pleasant. Remember that your students are not fully-formed adults, so they will do things that will test your every last ounce of self-restraint. Be the adult who responds calmly and pleasantly.

Students don’t mind asking adults for help, and the adults don’t seem to mind being helpful.

Is your classroom a place where students can ask questions safely? Do you encourage students to take risks? Is a struggling student an opportunity or an imposition? When a student comes in with a question, do you stop what you’re doing and help? Making your classroom a safe place to learn, to mess up, to explore, to get frustrated, and to ask for help is a key to making learning happen. 

The classrooms are full, but the hallways aren’t.

After years of seeing students wandering the halls without a sense of purpose or urgency, I have concluded that most of the students in the halls don’t really have to go to the restroom.  They’re just bored and restless.  Make your classroom a fun place to be so they’ll want to stay there. Ensure that they feel the time spent in your room is worthwhile and that they’ll miss something important if they aren’t there. And utilize state changes and activities that involve movement frequently so they can get the wiggles out in your room and not have to roam. 

No one is failing.

Isn’t it great when students feel successful? The beginning of the semester offers hope to all. As our gradebooks fill up, however, we chip away at the self-esteem of some of our students as they find themselves unsuccessful and increasingly see the futility of trying to dig their way out of the hole. I think, though, that if teachers work on the other six items on this list, they will create an environment that makes failure less desirable, encourages students to work harder and seek help when their efforts aren’t paying off, and maximizes success for all students.

I can already hear the naysayers telling me that these things could never happen. I concede that they’re probably right.  But isn’t it worth making an effort to make things perfect even if we don’t quite achieve perfection?

Thanks for the work you’re doing and will continue doing to help shape the future positively.

Have a wonderful new school year!

Craig

Heartbeats

On the morning of Thursday, June 18, I woke up and readied myself for the third and final day of presenting the English Language Arts Writing and Speaking strand at the first AVID Summer Institute of the season in Dallas. With the arrival of Hurricane (downgraded to Tropical Storm) Bill in Texas, the news had been filled for days with cataclysmic warnings of torrential rains, high water, and travel difficulties.  On this morning, when I clicked on the tv for a few minutes to see if Bill had more in store for us, I was jolted by the horrifying news of the mass shootings of nine churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Not having much time to watch because I had to get to my presentation room, I turned off the television and turned on my “AVID smile.”

All day long, the events lurked in the back of my mind as I stood in front of a roomful of outstanding educators and did my best to inspire them to be the difference in the lives of their students. My participants, as always, were an inspirational group of teachers, the type of teachers any parent would love to have instructing their kids.

The day was a great one, so much so that I didn’t have time to process the events in Charleston until later that evening. My first reaction was disbelief, followed by anger. As I scanned my Facebook feed and saw sentiments of friends and friends of friends, I saw that all of us were searching for answers, trying to make meaning out of something unfathomable.

Throughout all of this, I kept coming back to some words written by a young girl facing impossible-to-understand hatred and cruelty decades ago: "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death." This simple wisdom from Anne Frank reminded me to try to see the good in the midst of seeming hopelessness.

I was reminded of the AVID Summer Institute General Session on Wednesday afternoon, just hours before the violence erupted at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.  While a young man in Charleston plotted unspeakable cruelty, I sat in a room with 3,000 educators committed to changing the trajectories of students’ lives. The enthusiastic crowd listened raptly to the three stories shared by the speakers:  a teacher who found new purpose in her career as she entered the sometimes-frightening world of the AVID elective and discovered how her path changed as she nurtured her students to success; a young woman who overcame the tragic death of her mother and stumbled into AVID, which redirected her life and helped her become a confident, determined scholar headed with $100,000 in scholarships to college to become a doctor who will set up clinics globally to help those without access to quality health care; and an incoming senior who found in AVID a way to dig himself out of a pit of anger and despair. Each of these personal stories brought a tear to my eye, literally (don’t sit next to me at an AVID General Session unless you’re comfortable with watching a grown man cry).  More importantly, though, they reminded me of the power of AVID and the power of AVID educators.

            

On the day of our staff developer training prior to Summer Institute, we pondered the idea of heartbeats—how each of us touches the heartbeats of others we encounter. In the life of a teacher, we come in contact with thousands of heartbeats. In the next year alone, that ballroom full of educators will probably reach close to 500,000 heartbeats. And the way that attending AVID Summer Institute touched their heartbeats will spread to the half a million heartbeats they will encounter. That gives me cause for hope.

            

We live in a world of negativity. Violence and hatred seem to hide behind every corner. It’s easy to bog down in the gloom and forget the power of kindness. AVID is about kindness. AVID is about loving students who may not outwardly be lovable and helping them learn to love themselves. AVID is about finding hope in despair.

            

Sometimes it’s easy as a staff developer in a curriculum strand to focus on the countless worthwhile strategies teachers can employ to help students succeed. What we sometimes forget is that teaching is about the students—their lives, their heartbeats.    

            

Knowing that I had just spent three days with thousands of teachers committed to the notion that lives matter—black lives, brown lives, white lives, gay lives, transgender lives, homeless lives, non-English speaking lives, ALL lives—and accepting every student who walks into their classroom, believing in them, and making them believe in themselves helped me to find hope in despair.

            

I’m grateful for the people I’ve encountered through AVID who have touched my heartbeat and who touch the heartbeats of others who will, in turn, touch countless other heartbeats.

            

Instead of dwelling on the negative, let's turn this tragedy into an opportunity to spread the message of hope, inclusion, and love. Our world needs us to change some lives and touch some heartbeats right now.

            

The Value of Looking Back

Recently, my Facebook feed has been littered with posts from people about things that occurred one, two, or more years prior. “On this day one year ago” photos pop up, accompanied by comments like, “Hard to believe this was just one year ago,” “I forgot about this, “ “Wow, we’ve all changed so much,” “I was such an idiot then,” or, “Can you believe we were so concerned about that?” 

People are drawn to moments from their past that contrast to their present selves. “Throwback Thursday” photos often have the added purpose of highlighting the fashion and style atrocities of yesteryear with the implicit idea that we all look so much better now that we have the sense not to wear those parachute pants or style our hair in that once-fashionable mullet. 

The end of an academic year is an ideal time to have a Throwback Thursday of our own, to ask our students to project themselves back nine months into the past to see how they’ve grown and changed as a result of being in our classes. What do you know now that you didn’t know in September? What can you do now that you couldn’t do at the beginning of the school year? If you had it to do over again, what might you do differently?

This type of reflection belongs in the review weeks at the end of the school year. Ask students to create a graffiti wall displaying what they’ve learned. Have them compare a sample of recent work to a similar assignment from the beginning of school. Brainstorm a list of everything they wouldn’t know if they hadn’t taken your class. Let them reflect in writing about how far they’ve come, the obstacles they encountered along the way, and how they dealt with them. Encourage them to make some notes for themselves for next year so they don’t drive into any of the same potholes later.

Goal setting is a key aspect of instruction in our AVID classes as it should be in all our classes. Equally important is the time to look back at where we’ve been, celebrate our progress, and redirect our focus to the future.    

Like the Roman god Janus with two faces—one looking forward and one looking back—we  use our past experiences to steer ourselves successfully toward what is to come.

Thanks for all you do to help your AVID kids (and all your kids) make impressive strides on the road to success. 

Craig

Rubrics! Who Needs Them? You and Your Students

When I first started teaching English back in the day of dot matrix printers, I had never heard of that thing we call a rubric. Sure, we had criteria for assessing student work. but it was mostly in our heads. We viewed the product and, in our all-knowing English teacher wisdom, bestowed the grade the work deserved. I'd scrawl comments in the margins (mostly ones I would have to later interpret for a handful of conscientious students who couldn't read my red-penmanship) and hand the papers back. The great and powerful McKinney had spoken!

Fortunately, I've come a long way in 20 or so years. I now believe in the power of the rubric. I've written before about the importance of sharing rubrics with students before the assignment is completed and helping them to use rubrics to inform their work, but I've recently come to value to an equal degree the use of rubrics after assessment to guide their future efforts. 

In my humanities class, I have a recurring assignment called a Humanities Arts Experience, colloquially referred to by the pronounceable acronym HAE. In a nutshell, students venture into the real world for an arts experience at a theatre, museum, gallery, or concert hall and compose a newspaper-style review of their experiences. The rubric I've used for years is holistic, combining a number of skills and criteria for each grading designation. A "B paper," for instance, is more general than specific, relies more on summary than analysis, and contains errors in conventions that cause some minor difficulty for the reader. 

On the most recent essay,however, I developed a more detailed rubric. This one had eight criteria, and each criterion was detailed in a spreadsheet with descriptors for exemplary, proficient, acceptable, needs improvement, and unacceptable work.  

Here's a bit of technical stuff. Skip this paragraph if you're a technophobe. Students submitted their essays online on a Doc via Google Classroom, and I used the apps and extensions Doctopus and Goobric to attach my rubric electronically to each essay. All I had to do was "digest" the spreadsheet rubric using Doctopus, open the rubric on Goobric, select the tab for each criterion, click the appropriate descriptor in each category, type comments in the box, and press submit. Goobric pasted the entire rubric into the student's document, which I then returned to the student electronically. (Really, this is the easiest thing in the world. If technology appeals to you and you're tired of killing trees, grading mounds of physical papers, and listening to "my printer didn't work" excuses, you need to give this a try.)

Tomorrow in class, I will ask my students to open their documents and reflect on the rubric. If I deemed their introduction "acceptable" or told them their analysis "needs improvement," they can view my rubric's written explanation of what an exemplary product looks like in each of those categories, and they have something concrete to work on to improve next time. With eight categories to look at, the students will receive ample guidance to help their next HAE rival this one.   

Life was certainly easier for me when the great and powerful McKinney could bestow a grade on sight. What didn't occur to me then, though, was that the grade was not the most important thing. Student learning was. If it's my job to take these students in whatever condition they arrive in my classroom and lead them to where they need to be when they leave, I owe it to them to provide feedback and concrete steps for improvement. Students aren't naturally reflective, and many of them see the grade as the endpoint, but forcing them to spend some time thinking critically about their previous work and establishing a plan for improvement will help them develop the growth mindset and the tools they need to become exemplary. 

Something Funny is Going on in Your Classroom

A day without laughter is like a prom without music. A bowl of milk with no Cap'n Crunch. A birthday party with no guests. A classroom without laughter is a barren wasteland of dull, lifeless mental inactivity.

This thought of mine was confirmed by a blog post I read today that explores the link between laughter and learning. The author, Sarah Henderson, maintains that laughter and levity increase student retention of content, and she offers compelling evidence to support her point.

For many teachers, that's great news that confirms everything they've believed and tried to practice daily in classrooms around the world. For others, that's scary news. Not everyone is naturally funny. We can't all be Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Jerry Seinfeld, Wanda Sykes, David Sedaris, or Miranda Sings (look her up).

So what can the not-funny among us do to inject some wit into our classrooms?

Here are a few simple suggestions that are easily implementable by even the most humor-challenged among us:

Whimsical Classroom Traditions: Establishing a few lighthearted routines in your classroom can infuse some vitality into the most lifeless of educational environments. Doing this has the added bonus of creating a classroom culture and building memorable bonds with your students. In my classroom, for instance, we've instituted the tradition of the "Clappy Birthday" song. Inspired by minimalist composer Steve Reich, this alternative to the tone-deaf drudgery of the usual singing of "Happy birthday to you" replaces the singing with clapping; we clap the song in rhythm in honor of the birthday girl or boy. The kids get a kick out of this and remind us when we forget to observe birthdays in this silly and unusual method. Another example of this is evidenced by the sign in the front of my classroom that reads, "Oh, queso." This was inspired by the ubiquitous public speaking habit of beginning a presentation with the filler phrase, "Okay, so...." When students present in front of the class, we take great joy in catching them in this speech tic, and the students are quick to point out when their teacher slips and makes a similar mistake. Just yesterday, a group of former students visited after school and remarked (fondly) how the "Oh, queso" reminder has stuck with them.

Corny Jokes: In her blog, Sarah Henderson gives the caveat that only relevant humor has the effect of increasing student retention of learned material. In other words, just telling jokes about off-topic subjects may be fun, but it doesn't help the kids learn. My frequently hilarious teaching partner, Linda, is a master of the corny history joke. She's renowned among the students for sharing groaners about the material they're studying in class. Why did Julius Caesar buy crayons? He wanted to Mark Antony. Where did Montezuma go to college? Az Tech. How was the Roman Empire divided? With a pair of Caesars.The students may grimace when she tells these, but they remember them. I still recall a terrible joke my Pre-Cal teacher, Mr. Bernard. told us about "putting Descartes before the horse" way back in the 80s. Clearly, there's something to be said for digging out a few jokes to liven up your lectures. A simple Google search will turn up more jokes than you'll know what to do with about whatever subject you teach.

Let the Kids Be Funny:  Kids are about a thousand times more funny than teachers...at least to one another. Give your students opportunities to share their wit in content-related classroom activities. Yesterday, the aforementioned master teacher, Linda, came up with a brilliant and enjoyable way to debrief a history chapter. She divided the students into groups and assigned each group a song title and a fictitious musical group who would perform the song: "Please China, Won't You Convert?" by the Missionaries; "Bye-Bye Mongols" by the Ming; "Sorry to Plague You" by Black Death; "You Got Cotton, We Got Sugar" by Diffusion; "Revival" by Renaissance; and several others. The students' task was to choose a tune, write a song with their assigned title that showed what they learned in the reading, and then perform the songs for the class. We laughed all day long at the groups' hilarious renditions of these soon-to-be chart toppers. And our students reinforced what they learned in the chapter in a way that will stick for much longer than might occur fromn a less jovial lesson.

If you're stuck in a rut of deadly serious instruction, give some of these ideas a whirl. What's the worst thing that can happen? Your students might laugh at you? At least they're laughing.

      

What Reality TV Can Teach Us About Assessment

Back before I finally pulled the plug on my cable TV, I was once a reality TV addict. My favorites were the competition shows, the ones that pitted ordinary people against one another in a weekly competition, eliminating one person at a time until a victor emerged. Today, while I was doing a bit of last-minute rubric analysis with my students to make sure they understood the writing expectations for next week's state assessment, it occurred to me how much I could learn about good instruction--and particularly assessment--from the television I used to watch so avidly.

Let's take Project Runway as an example. On this show, a crop of wannabe designers performed ridiculous weekly challenges in hopes that a celebrity panel of Heidi Klum and her team of fashionistas would deem their garments worthy of remaining "in" the competition for another week. While designers toiled in the workroom, Tim Gunn periodically popped in to monitor progress, dispense advice, ask questions, make faces, and provide helpful suggestions about how the judges might react to the hastily assembled products. When the time limit expired, the designers paraded their outfits in front of the judges who each offered feedback and candid opinions before making a final judgment and declaring one of the designers "out." Throughout all of this, the producers of the show provided viewers with snippets of interviews with the contestants discussing their progress or lack thereof.

This design-and-judge approach is not unlike what goes on in classrooms all over the world. Teachers present challenges to their students, allow the students to work on them to demonstrate mastery, and assess the final products according to a rubric. Too often, though, we leave Tim Gunn and the interview snippets out of the equation. We go from assignment to summative assessment without allowing for formative assessment and student feedback along the way. Then we are frustrated when the final products don't meet our expectations or are surprised at the number of students who didn't succeed. Educators can't forget that it's our duty to check in with our students periodically along the way so we can catch them before they veer too far off track and offer them guidance to get back on course. Without the wisdom of Tim Gunn, the designers on Project Runway would struggle unnecessarily with a tricky seam construction, get bogged down on an insignificant detail, and fail to manage their time adequately, resulting in an unsatisfactory, slapdash, or incomplete final product. The show's interview clips provide opportunities for the contestants to voice their own understandings of the task and their progress. Similarly, we should require students to talk about their understanding of the assignments in their own words, to summarize the elements of the rubric, and to reflect on the work they are doing as they are doing it rather than waiting to reflect on the final product only. By encouraging this metacognition and awareness of the task and expectations, teachers can help students guide their progress, focus on the most important elements, and produce the best results possible.

Another show I miss from my cable television days is The Worst Cooks in America. In this delightful series, a hapless and inept bunch of newbies, who have been nominated by their loved ones due to their lack of culinary skills, enter an industrial kitchen to be mentored by two celebrity chefs who each take a team of non-cooks and attempt to pass them off as trained professionals. Each week, the chefs-in-training learn a new technique--poaching an egg, filleting a fish, making a sauce--and, once they've supposedly mastered it, get to create a meal on their own to showcase their new skill. After the "learning" stage in which the chefs offer guidance in the kitchen, the competitors must complete the final task without supervision while the celebrity chefs cower nervously in the corner and pray that their proteges can perform without their assistance. The final meal is eaten and judged, and one sad loser says goodbye to the TV kitchen and goes home to inflict his or her under-appreciated cooking skills on the family.

The thing I love about thinking about this show in relationship to the classroom is that it emphasizes the importance of supervised practice on specific skills. The celebrity chefs don't just throw an unwieldy task at their trainees and hope it goes well. Instead, they demonstrate the week's focus technique, allow the cooks to practice it with guidance, provide feedback, and then step up the difficulty by asking them to apply their knowledge to a more challenging, complicated task. This is exactly what we should be doing as teachers. Instead of assigning an entire essay, project, or lab report and hoping the students can figure out all the individual components and put them together into a suitable final product, we should allow students to complete a portion of the assignment--or a sample portion of a similar assignment--and offer feedback before we ask them to combine multiple skills into a final masterpiece. An art teacher could ask his students to practice sketching, shading, and texturing in small assignments in a notebook before drawing a still life for a major-grade assessment. Writing students might learn how to develop thesis statements, write introductions, and incorporate research using correct citation in separate lessons before having to pull all those skills together into an entire essay. A PE teacher or coach drills her young athletes in dribbling, shooting, and blocking before putting them on the court to play a full game.

Throughout the year in my class, I've tried to apply these principles to help my students succeed in the various challenges I've placed before them. Recently, that's been true as I've worked to make sure they are prepared for the weirdness of the expository essay on next week's STAAR test. I've allowed them to explain the rubric in their own words. I've modeled effective word choice and revision and have allowed them to practice on their own and on others' writing. I've offered feedback along the way. We've dissected example essays. We've written thesis statements, brainstormed supporting anecdotes, blended sentences together with transitions, outlined, drafted, and assessed our work and the work of others.

Next week, you can find me cowering in the corner and praying that my students can successfully complete whatever challenge the STAAR test makers throw at them.







         

How We Do It All Day Long

At the end of the second of five class periods, the guest speaker turned to me with a look of exhaustion and asked, "How do you do this all day long?"

By the end of sixth period, she was, as they say, "phoning it in." A glazed expression in her eyes, she continued to click through her PowerPoint slides and deliver the same art history lesson with the same inflections, the same pauses, and the same practiced information. My students sat there dutifully taking notes, some of them occasionally jolting back to semi-alertness after nodding off momentarily.

Early in the day the speaker told me she didn't have much experience with high schoolers, that she aspired to teach college students so that she could lecture and they could take notes.

Please note that I'm not trying to disparage this brave guest speaker who spent a long day sharing some valuable and interesting knowledge about the art of the Tang and Song Dynasties. Clearly, she knew her stuff and had prepared carefully for her day with my students.

But as I sat and watched her deliver the same lecture five times throughout the day, I had ample time to ponder her question: "How do you do this all day long?"

By the end of the day, the answer became clear. It's not about the content; it's about the students.

Though I like to fancy myself a pretty interesting public speaker who can deliver a 50-minute lecture with witty anecdotes, intriguing nuggets of trivia, abundant humor, and powerful visuals to accompany my ideas, the reality is that if I get too engrossed in my own knowledge-spewing, my students are passive and bored to tears.

The secret to surviving an entire day of teaching the same thing one period after another is to focus on the students. Involve them. Allow them to talk and question. Let them generate knowledge. Permit them to reflect and digest.

One of the many things I love about AVID is its instructional emphasis on WICOR: writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading. Even a "lecture day" provides opportunity for at least three of these: writing, inquiry, and collaboration.

The average person (and teenagers sometimes don't perform at average-person capacity) can only pay attention to a speaker for about ten minutes. Most of us drift off more quickly than that and begin making mental shopping lists, thinking about relatives who deserve a call, or dreaming about things beyond the parameters of the lecture hall or classroom.

The easy fix for this is to follow the 10-2-2 model. Lecture for a maximum of ten minutes; allow the students to write, revise, and reflect on their notes for two minutes; and ask the students to share their thoughts, questions, understandings, and reflections with a partner for two minutes. After that opportunity to interact on paper and with others, the students' brains are recharged and ready for another ten minutes of teacher talk.

An even better solution is to ask the students to do something creative with their learning--a quick presentation, a drawing, a bumper sticker slogan, a tiny poem, a monologue, a skit--and to share their products with the class. I assure you that what the students will have to say is a billion times more interesting and more memorable than anything you've got stored up in your well-practiced lecture.

The added bonus of allowing this type of interaction is that each class period is different. Though the content remains the same, the student input keeps it fresh for the teacher. The day is a lot less repetitive when you, the teacher, get to hear from the authentic voices of students.

So in answer to the guest speaker's question, "How do you do this all day long?", my response it that I do my best to focus on the students. I enjoy their unique personalities, laugh at their jokes, listen to their stories and personal connections, welcome their questions, clarify their confusion, and remember that they're the ones who are supposed to be getting something from the time they spend in my classroom.

That's how I've done it for 22 years, and I hope that's how I continue to do it until they wheel me out of my classroom someday in the distant future.