I sat in the back of the room with a scantron and an eighty-question multiple choice test in front of me like it was 1999 all over again. My forearms stuck to my desk as the ninety-degree September heat seeped into our classroom. In front of me sat twenty-eight of our students, nervously attempting their first test and wondering why their teacher was seated behind them as they tried to concentrate on the first question.
1. The headright system adopted in the Virginia ColonyA) determined the eligibility of a settler for voting and holding office.B) toughened the laws applying to indentured servants.C) gave 50 acres of land to anyone who would transport himself to the colony.D) encouraged the development of urban centers.E) prohibited the settlement of single men and women in the colony.
Whew. I knew the answer was C. I filled in the bubble on the scantron and moved to the next question. A few minutes later, a security guard named Frank entered the classroom with a pass for a student. He looked around the room trying to find me in the logical spots. We finally locked eyes, and he gave me an odd look as if to say, âWhat are ya doing back there?â
I will admit I sort of looked like Buddy the Elf squeezing my 6â4ââ frame into a high school desk.
This was the first time I was not sitting at my own desk grading papers or checking my email on test day. I will also admit I have given tests to my students without actually previewing every question. I may or may not have just printed off the answer key and used the electronic grading machine when it was all over. I ran the scantrons through the machine and emailed the class the results. The class average was 47 out of 80, good enough to be in play for a 3 on the AP exam but an F in the gradebook. Their average was aided by the performance of their teacher, who scored a respectable, but far from exemplary, 67/80.
By taking the exams with the students, I hoped to prove my support for them and that I was still learning too. We could review the exams together and talk aloud about which responses were deliberate distractors and how we arrived at correct answers. Our students could revel in the fact that they would sometimes answer a question correctly when their teacher answered wrong.
The first step in building empathy is putting yourself in someone elseâs shoes. This activity certainly afforded me that opportunity.
Learning about my Advanced Placement teaching assignment thrust me into the role of leadership in my classroom and my department. Despite entering my fifth year of teaching, I was still one of the youngest members of our faculty, and I was teaching one of the only two AP classes the department offered. Naturally, I felt pressure to perform, knowing I would be under the watchful eye of my department colleagues, chairman, and the administration.
I cut my teeth as an educator teaching our lowest level of US history and was a member of the curriculum team. We had four members on our team with more than twenty yearsâ experience individually, so I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut in meetings.
Back in my classroom, where I could be the expert, I told the stories of our nationâs past with enthusiasm and passion. Many times during those first few years, however, I received feedback from colleagues about things I was doing and saying wrong in class. One teacher would sit in our office next to my classroom and listen to my class. Often, I would finish the lesson and receive an email summary detailing my mistakes, including targeted feedback about how poorly I contextualized the topic.
Some of my evaluators even said I was talking too much in class and not letting the students think enough on their own. My first formal evaluation noted that my presence was domineeringâstifling my studentsâ voices. The feedback I received was probably justified and, ultimately, made me a more reflective educator. But it did not make it any easier to hear.
Itâs safe to say a few colleagues doubted me early on.
Still, my natural inclination as an AP teacher was to lead. I had to be the director, the source of knowledge, and the one who had the answers when the smartest kids asked good questions. As you will come to know in this book, I was inâand remain inâa constant struggle to live up to these ideals.
As I thought back on my experience as an AP student, I remembered feeling tremendous competition amongst my peers. I attended a small private high school of 700 students. With ten future Ivy League students in my class alone, I often felt overwhelmed. We would consistently compare grades and balk at the thought of sharing notes. I was a sophomore in a class filled with juniors. It was intimidating and, at times, unwelcoming.
Our teacher, Mr. Finch, was a fine educator, and this class had been his baby for many years. He was a legend among legends, the kind that your older brothers and sisters told you about. Mr. Finch knew his stuff, and man, could he tell a story. Sure, the teacher was the source of knowledge in class. But those stories often stuck with us, whether they were about history or not. In fact, I remember bringing in my cassette tape âTalkboyâ to record some of his lectures.
One day, he stopped teaching the section on the New Deal to tell us a story about playing basketball for Joliet Junior College against the Statesville prisoners. During warm-ups, he looked down toward the other end of the bleachers to see a man with a newspaper covering his face. The man looked up from the paper, and my teacher thought he recognized him. He was just sitting thereâa prisoner watching his fellow inmates as they challenged the college players, but this was no ordinary prisoner.
This particular man had committed one of the most famous mass murders in Chicago history. In July of 1966, he systematically murdered eight nurses and was on the loose for over forty-eight hours. Mr. Finch remembered watching it on the news as a seven-year-old hearing that the suspect was headed down I-55, an interstate road in Illinois that led to his hometown, Joliet. From that moment on, the murderer became his childhood boogieman.
Still questioning if the man with the newspaper was actually the boogieman of his youth, Mr. Finch intentionally dribbled a basketball off his foot, so it would end up at the other end of the gym. He had to find out. When he went to retrieve the ball, which had settled in the corner close to where the inmate was seated, the man looked up from his paper.
âAre you Richard Speck?â Mr. Finch asked timidly.
Speck slowly looked at the Joliet Junior College player and responded, âYes, I am.â
You cannot make this stuff up. Mr. Finch put on an amazing show for our class.
The kids who worked hard in Mr. Finchâs class passed the exam. The others did not. Our teacher preached a message of taking the national exam only if he thought we could pass. I will never forget him telling me that I should not take it.
âSharos, you cannot even keep up on your notes, and you have a C in the class,â he told me. âIf you take this test, you are going to waste your momâs seventy dollars. I have been doing this long enough to know who can pass the test and who cannot.â
I took the exam anyway.
When I started teaching, I thought I was alone. I would close the door of the classroom, and it was just the students and me. As Iâve come to find, that could not be further from the truth, especially in Advanced Placement classes.
You see, that class I took in high school had no unity in a space where opportunity to unify existed. As many as 300,000 other students around the country were on the same journey to pass this test with their 11,000 teachers in AP US Historyâand that was just for one test. What an amazing opportunity to adopt the âus against the worldâ mentality.
In my work as a teacher, administrator, consultant, and presenter, Iâve had the opportunity to observe lots of different professionals in education and other fields. Honestly, I have to say that I havenât actually seen many people who deserve to be more successful than they are.
You know those folks who go on âyo-yoâ diets all the time? One day, the diet is on, but the next day, the diet is off. No matter how much they eat or exercise, most people end up regressing or progressing back toward their biological mean. Similarly, many teachers have trouble wrapping their heads around that painful truth: We usually end up right around where we should.
So the questions become: What can all of us do to become more successful? How can we maximize our potential and even go beyond where we should be?
The answer is staring you in the face every time you enter a classroom, an administration meeting, or an after-school parent event: You need your team. You need to find a team that is more than the sum of its parts and a team that will not accept 1.96 class averages and 18 percent pass rates. Building a team like that takes time and effort, but it is the only way to maximize your potential. Find people who complement your efforts and your experience.
Who were my teammates?
Youâve already heard what many of my colleagues thought of my chances of success.
Have you ever been approached by a student after class or school and just sensed that they wanted to get something off their chest? One time, a girl named Ashley hung around after her friends left my room, claiming she needed to finish a âfew more test corrections.â I knew something was off. She apologized to me for not âacting like herself lately.â
âIs everything okay with you?â I asked.
She shared with me that her parents were going through a divorce. Ashley was the youngest child, and her older siblings had already gone off to college. It must have been tough on her, being sixteen and living through this. I never knew what to do in these situations besides just listen. This time, I felt compelled to try and give some adviceâagainst my better judgment.
I mentioned to her that this was a tremendous opportunity to learn about relationshipsâwe can always learn from what is around us, from both success and failure. Perhaps Ashley would get married someday, and, if so, her commitment to her future spouse will be so strong because she had learned what ânotâ to do by watching it firsthand at home.
Looking for a silver lining in such an awful situation was difficult, but it did get me thinking.
I was on her team. Our class was on her team. Our school was a safety net for her. This wasnât about my students fighting for grades against each other, judging each other, or competing against each other. Who was I to tell my students that they could not take the exam at the end of the year? Like my own AP experience in high school, and like my studentâs tough situation, we can always learn what not to do from a bad experience.
There were only twenty-eight of us that first year. It was a small army but a good one. Why couldnât it be all of us versus the test, all of us versus the other 300,000 test-takers, all of us versus the world?
As their teacher, I had to flip the script. On the first day of class, I held the 1200...