Yo Mista!

"They're calling this the Bible of effective instruction!" my former principal excitedly announced four years ago in front of his entire teaching staff at the beginning of the school year. He was talking about Doug Lemov's book,  Teach Like a  Champion .  In my five years of teaching, four have always started with school leadership enthusiastically distributing copies of this book . In short,  Teach Like a Champion  outlines 49  techniques  for inexperienced teachers to become "master teachers." Before I take a shit on the movement this book has created, I'll say this: Teach Like a Champion does aptly summarize what any teacher should do at the minimum . It's by no means a recipe for championship teaching, but rather a list of tools all teachers should be comfortable using when appropriate. The "championship" teaching happens when those 49 techniques are coupled with passion, personality, grit, intuition, and improvisation skills.  My ...

I tend to arrive to school earlier than most. Usually the only person to greet me at school in the morning is the school safety officer posted at the main entrance. I'll say good morning to him as I make my way down my school's (only) hallway towards my classroom. Even though I've still got about an hour or so until students start rolling in, sometimes there's a student who beats everyone (including me) to school: his name is Ross and I have absolutely no clue what to do with him. I mean academically I have no clue. In fact, I'm pretty sure the American education system as it stands right now doesn't know what to do with him. Ross is sixteen years old, but by his high school transcript, he's still considered a high school freshman. His family moved to New York City from the Dominican Republic when he was old enough to be enrolled in elementary school. His state standardized test scores would tell you that he's still in elementary school. It's ...

I'm back.  It's been nearly a year since I've last written on Yo Mista!  A lot has changed personally. Yet nothing has changed professionally. And I guess that's why I've been so uninspired to write.  Over the last year, my professional life took a backseat to my personal life. When the dust settled, I realized I didn't want to write  Yo Mista!  anymore. I still felt passionate about my work, but I was somehow uninspired. My day-to-day at school over the last year hasn't changed. I still teach over-age, at-risk students at an alternative high school. Everyday, crazy shit happens in my classroom. Everyday, a student either feels supremely connected to me and my content or feels without direction and completely out of touch with education. My students and I still keep each other on our toes. The only problem is, I'm getting jaded.  This is my fifth year of teaching at-risk youth and I'm getting tired of seeing students arrive to school hig...

Nikhil Goyal is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the education world. In the TED Talk below, Goyal calls for an education revolution. His beliefs and thoughts seem to echo with education reform activists Sir Ken Robinson, Diane Ravitch, Alfie Kohn, etc.  So what's different about this guy vs. the others? We've all heard this "call to change the system as we know it" before. Well, consider this: Nikhil Goyal is a 17-year-old high school senior. We need more students like Goyal if we really want to transform the system. Question/conundrum: how do we effectively develop other students' critical thinking skills to Goyal's level and beyond with our current and outdated education system? 

In a recent report published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, where a student lives still determines where a student ends up, despite a decade's worth of "education reforms" in NYC. " The portfolio district model adopted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City is often held up as a national model  for high school 'choice,' touted as the best way to reduce pernicious race- and income-based achievement gaps. According to this model, student demographics are 'no excuse' for poor performance: teacher quality is the single most important determinant of student success. But this AISR study on college readiness shows that in spite of a decade of efforts in New York City to expand choice and ensure that the most disadvantaged students do not invariably attend the most disadvantaged schools, student demographics still stubbornly dictate destiny ." Gotham Schools posted this link yesterday that brilliantly maps this study'...

I saw this nifty graphic on a blog  this morning and decided to re-post it in honor of Regents testing going on in high schools across New York state for the next two weeks. May the test Gods be with you.

The idea and privilege of "tenure" in public education has garnered a lot of attention as of late. Most people who have never worked in education a single day in their lives seem to feel that tenure is unfair and teachers should work under the same expectations that other "regular" and hard-working Americans work under. At least, that's the narrative being presented in the media. Three years ago, I would have agreed, but I didn't know any better. At the college and university level,  tenure  is difficult to obtain and can take 4-8 years. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but from what I think I know, the candidate usually needs to have published some sort of research and have demonstrated a strong teaching record, among other things. Before becoming a high school teacher, I understood why tenure was necessary at the college and university level as it protected academics when they published work that went against the mainstream, and thereby prevented profes...