Plan your work; work your plan–part 3 of the teacher story

My success as a teacher came from all that work I did before ever going into education. I had to be able to handle a multitude of projects and personalities on my previous jobs and that flowed into my teaching career. It was a matter of planning and assessing and readjusting, usually every day.

When my mother learned that I was returning to school to get my teaching credential, she was pleased and said I should have done that all along.

“No, sorry Mom, but I couldn’t have been a good teacher at 22.”

After dealing with hundreds of brokers and truck drivers every day, juggling the needs of the customers with the output of the plant, and making it all work, I knew I could do a good job in a classroom. Sure enough, with lots of planning, the classroom ran just about as efficiently as my previous workspace had done. It just changed every nine months.

Planning tools for all those years of teaching

I knew that I wanted to work in a tough school. I wanted to make a difference in kids’ lives so I picked a low-achieving high school in a poor part of town to do my student teaching. My supervisor was not pleased; he had asked me to take a position in the ultra conservative, ultra white school district across town. No, that was not where I was needed. Those kids would succeed with or without me.

He visited me twice during my student teaching and told me, after the second visit, he could not come back as the classes were too disruptive for him to be comfortable. Huh? They really weren’t. The students were well mannered and polite to me (I would see, later in my career, just how great these classes had been) but they did tend to act out with one another. They were noisy when entering or leaving the room, and I did break up a fight or two right outside my door.

I learned to monitor the classroom to make sure work was being accomplished and equipment treated properly. That method of classroom management continued for the next 21 years. My students were always on task, and if they weren’t, I knew it.

It took lots of planning to be successful

I had been successful in school and I wanted my students to be likewise. I had been successful on all of my jobs, doing my work well, and I wanted my students to do that when they went to work. I planned lessons that brought the real world into the classroom and I took students out into the world so they could see what work looked like. Always planning, always preparing, always assessing. It became my life.

Come back and the next time I’ll tell you how I ended up at the inner city school where I spent those 21 years. I will give you a hint: I never applied for the job.

Do we know just how much the world has changed?

The world of work changed while I was toiling away in the classroom.  I wonder how many other teachers know this. Are the educational institutions preparing people for the new world or are we still using the same methods and techniques that worked a quarter century ago?

For the past few weeks I have been taking the BART train downtown, walking a couple of blocks, to a building that for over 100 years has been home to the venerable San Francisco Chronicle. As newspapers lost readership to the Internet, the Chronicle was not spared, and with losses growing, it cut staff, and in cutting staff, it didn’t need all that space in the big building at Mission and 5th. Creative genius to rejigger the street level into a new use–The Hub SoMa.

This is where I am working for a couple of days a week for a microfinance startup. They have an office in the Hub, and as I walk through the open space each day to the office, I marvel at all the young (and some not-so-young) people working at their computers, talking amongst themselves, gathered into meetings. I have begun to realize that this looks much like my classroom for the seniors and the yearbook class. No one is lecturing, no one is wandering around asking, “what are you doing?” No one is policing the work that is being (or not being) done. The Hub occupants are responsible for themselves. Just as I wanted my students to be. In school, just as here, there must be an assessment: how well have you done your job and what have you produced? No one is handing out scantrons for multiple choice answers.

Paper-pencil tasks no longer exist in this work environment. Everyone has a laptop and when they want to show someone something, they just pick up their computer and go show them. They carry the laptops to meetings, not pads and pens. I am the only one in the office who is using a notepad and a pen. My old style of thinking on paper is a hard habit to break. Give me time, though, I may shake it. I believe you can teach an old dog new tricks, it just takes a little longer.

It’s only been a few weeks since I have been out of the classroom and taking on this new challenge of going back into the workforce, but I can already see things I would do differently if I was in the classroom. There would be many more collaborative projects. I would break students into groups immediately and start giving them tasks for which they must find a solution. There would be a lot more online research; even though I had integrated that into my lessons, I see now that it was not enough. Students need to think in a different, less linear way than I see us using in education.

It’s a different world out there. How are we training our students to work in it?

Where do you work?

The world has certainly changed since I last looked for a job.  I have begun to think more and more about where and how I would like to work in my next job, and I’ve decided I certainly don’t need a desk in an office; that I could work anywhere what with all the mobile technology that is out there.  Teaching, which I am leaving, no longer needs a classroom in a school.  Online learning is becoming more popular and even a local school district is allowing its summer school students to take classes via a computer at their home.

I just read this over on another blog:

My friend Rael lives in Portland and works at an office in San Francisco, and he does it via Skype. At the office, he’s got a desk, chair, and a computer with a webcam, microphone, and Skype always running. When he sits down to work at his desk in Portland, he video Skypes into his San Francisco workstation for the entire workday. His California co-workers joke that he’s just a floating head on a screen. But when someone in the office needs to talk to him, they go sit at his desk and do so. He can hear ambient conversations going on around the office and they can hear and see him. In fact, on a particularly quiet day at the office, someone complained that his keyboard clacking was too loud! The always-on video connection lets Rael’s co-workers know when he’s at his desk, see his expressions during conversations, and watch his body language when they’re collaborating on-screen.

To collaborate with a co-worker on-screen, Rael uses iChat’s screen-sharing feature. It lets him point, click, and type on the same screen simultaneously with a co-worker. If you don’t have a Mac running iChat, Skype offers screen-sharing as well as a service called LogMeIn.

I got a taste of working like this a few months ago when I did a webinar with Microsoft and ISTE.  The whole thing was set up through conference calls and some nifty meeting software, and although we never met face-to-face, I got to know the participants pretty well and felt very comfortable working in that mode.

I would be very willing to work remotely, without an actual desk in an office; and even though I like being around people, I think I would like using tools like Skype to interact and engage with my coworkers.