Vickie Gill

                Against all odds, the high school I’ve been working with is not only up and running, it is establishing itself as a unique and desirable place for students to prepare for their futures.  They opened the enrollment period last week for the 2010-11 school year, and almost one third of the available spaces are filled already.

                This hasn’t been an easy journey, especially for the staff.  As we are asked to do more with less, plans change and visions are altered while we brace ourselves for further cuts to our bare-bones budget.  The pressure is on, and as always, the stress can produce frustration, short tempers, and blame.  But I’ve also seen resilience, flashes of brilliance, and well-placed humor.  The hard-core professionals among us vent with close friends and trusted colleagues who will help us find solutions and keep our perspective.  The best are able to hide their exhaustion, disappointment, and negativity from the students.  I’ve been criticized for saying that people who work in schools cannot afford the luxury of a bad day.  Teaching is very similar to sales and performance art—the show must go on and the customer is easy to lose.  We are constant role models; our students may forget what we taught them about, let’s say, cell division or a comma splice, but they’ll long remember how we handled ourselves on the job.

                Conducting ourselves as professionals has a far greater importance than mere job security; we need to be mindful of the powerful impact that we have on our students as they develop their impressions of appropriate adult behavior.  A few years ago I read a description of a multimedia presentation titled uBung, written by Josse de Pauw.  The audience faces a large movie screen that covers the entire back wall of the stage.  On it runs a film of a group of adults at a party—laughing, joking, flirting, drinking, and later on, fighting.  Standing in front of the screen on stage is a group of ten-year-olds who mimic the adults’ actions in an eerily realistic manner.  In Flemish, uBung means “practice,” and de Pauw is making the point that children are observers of the adult world—watching, mimicking, and learning.  This is the joy and the burden of the teacher.  Many of us will be remembered as some of the most influential people in our students’ lives, and attention must be paid to what we do and what we say.

I had the oddest experience the other day.  I was walking from my office to my next class and passed the open door of a fourth grade classroom.  I saw a room full of children busily engaged in a task and their teacher leaning over a student’s desk offering words of encouragement.  As I hurried to meet my students, I was filled with a sense of love for this woman who was a stranger to me–my heart actually “swelled” like it used to when I would check on my sleeping children.

I have spent most of my life in schools–for me it was like one of those bad romantic comedies where two people start out hating each other, then the relationship turns into the love of their lives.  As a kid, I hated school; as a teacher, it morphed into a 30-year love affair.  Throughout my career, I have known teachers who I admire and tried to emulate, but other than a few close friends, it hasn’t felt like love–until the other day.

This has been the toughest opening of a school year I can remember.  The budget crisis has forced everyone working in schools and universities across the country to do more for less.  The tension over who would be retained and who would be let go has divided colleagues, and caused resentment and guilt to seep into faculty meetings and lunchtime conversations.  Yesterday I read in a newspaper that the federal government was awarding a local law enforcement agency a million dollar grant to work with men and women on probation.  Of course it’s important to help these people transition into a productive lifestyle, but why don’t we realize that shortchanging the schools will always result in an increase in the needs of those who cannot find their way?

I can imagine many educators have been ready to throw it in and find a less stressful way to make a living that allows for little things like regular bathroom breaks and more than 20-minutes to eat lunch.  We are held responsible for the test scores of children we didn’t raise, and in most cases, instruct for only a year.  School districts are forced to grab as much ADA money as possible just to pay the bills, so kindergarten classes have increased from 20 to 30 5-year-olds, and high school classes jam 40 teenagers in a room, forcing teachers to spend more time on crowd control than academic instruction.

But there’s that teacher who has managed to engage her students as she takes the time to patiently help a child who doesn’t understand.  I am filled with love for the experienced teachers who stay and for the brand new teachers who have taken on this wonderful, difficult work.  I walked to my classroom inspired and ready to give my best–one more time.

School will start in a few weeks–there’s always that mixture of excitement and dread, the known and the unknown.  I’m concerned this year because when we left in June, we were shocked by the cuts to the budget but we also had a sense that the worst was over.  Not so.  No one is sure exactly what will happen when we open.

I worked most of the summer–many people forget that teachers are not on vacation in the summer, they’re unemployed for a few months.  I talked with teachers at every grade level, and the gist of our conversations was that people are sick of feeling paranoid and tired of having to do more with less.  One thing that hasn’t changed–never changes–is that most teachers love their students and want to create the best learning experience possible for them.

Just like a bad marriage or a bad investment, there comes a point where you give up on the old and try something new.  If we’re lucky, that will be the response to this crisis.  In trying to make that point in one of my workshops, I asked the teachers when we first present the concept of subject/verb agreement to our students.  Most agreed it was in second grade.  I pointed out that when I work with 9th grader who still makes blatant errors when they write, I’m aware that I have to teach grammar and usage in a very different way.  Why do the same thing, year after year, workbook after workbook, when it doesn’t work?  Do something different.

I’m sure that’s listed somewhere in some business model–”Think Small”–”Think outside the Box”–”Think”.  We don’t need profit margins running our schools–like standardized test scores–but we do need to adopt the best of the business practices, which brings me to tenure.  It’s time to let it go.  I’ve always done things differently in my classrooms; I gave up teaching in fear long ago.  I’m not sure whether I’d have been fired somewhere along the line without tenure protecting me, but I know I would have felt confident that someone would value my services.  Last year was the first time in 30 years of teaching that I did not work with a burned-out, ineffective teacher whose job was protected by tenure.  That’s because we had a staff of six core teachers and a few part-timers in a brand new school. 

The teachers’ union was created to protect teachers’ rights–to lobby for benefits and shield teachers from being unfairly attacked and fired.  Teaching is not a competitive job–sure, we compete for leadership positions, prime classroom space, and a cushier duty schedule, but overall, we are paid by our years on the job and you can’t underestimate the value of experience.  I walk into a classroom on the first day with a sense of confidence that has been earned through years of hard work–my students benefit from my decades on the job.  However, we can’t mix up experience with expertise. 

I firmly believe that 99% of all teachers enter the profession with a sincere desire to do the best job they can.  I also know that those who misjudged the challenges inherent in working with kids or those who did not receive support from their colleagues sometimes just give up.  Or worse, just get bitter.  After a few months, it’s easy to spot the gifted teachers; it’s just as easy to spot those who are not suited to the profession.  If they slip under the radar for three years, it takes extraordinary measures to remove them from the job.  That makes no sense.  A committee elected by their peers can fairly judge whether a teacher should be retained or let go. 

This year talented teachers received pink slips because they lacked tenure or seniority.  Teachers who do more harm than good retained their jobs and were protected by their unions.  In talking to the young teachers at the end of last year, most were dismayed by the budget cuts, but all said, “I’m just happy to have a job.”  They know they have to work for their position and pay more attention to their students’ needs than the back-biting going on in the teachers’ lounge.  They need to stay competitive, they need to hone their teaching skills, they need to find a way to get along.  In any community, teachers have always been among the leaders.  We need to use our common sense and talent for evaluating work to create a system of teacher evaluation that will protect the growth and prune the dead weight.

My friend Cynthia asked me to do a presentation in her SCWriP workshop for teachers who work with students on their writing.  I knew none of the participants but they were all familiar–over the years I’ve taught with every one of them.  There was the enthusiastic English teacher who loves to write and is hungry for ways to pass that love along to her students.  There was the kindergarten teacher who is completely open trying out material that she could never use with her students; she’s smart enough to realize that she, too, is a writer and needs to tend to her craft.  And as always, there was the long-time teacher who had nothing to learn and worked on other things–he just wasn’t ready for anything new.   All of them were lucky enough to spend three days with Cynthia, a gifted writer who uses her love of words to help her students discover that they have something to say, and that writing is an essential and powerful tool.

After my presentation, I asked if there were any questions.  There were–frustrated inquiries about how to foster a love for creative and personal writing when our classrooms have been taken over by standardized tests and curriculum guides put together by people who have never met the kids who sit in front of us.  It’s easy for me to stand before these teachers and encourage them not to work in fear–I’m at the end of my career, and if push comes to shove, I’ll figure out how to get by.  But I encouraged them to teach from their passion, to pass on their love for learning to their students–to model the joy.  Attention must be paid to the requirements of the job, but teaching is too difficult to do day after day without a sense of excitement about what you’ll be sharing with your kids.  I know my students face a barrage of standardized tests, some of which will help them open doors to colleges and increase their opportunities later on.  I know that if my students fail these tests, my administrators and some of the parents will lose faith in me.  But I also know that the surest way to kill ideas and creativity is to shove them in boxes:  A, B, C, D, or all of the above.

So when a standardized test is on the horizon (and lately they just loom), I get my students to approach it like a battle.  We gear up for the fight and we will take no prisoners.  In my experience, kids’ test scores will go up automatically if they are motivated when they sit down to fill in the bubbles and the blanks.  My presentation started with a fun activity I share with my kids that generates journal writing, which can lead to creative writing, which can lead to a college-type personal statement, and can produce a thoughtful academic essay.  I teach my students “tricks” to jump-starting a timed essay, and I encourage them to concentrate on form rather than content for certain tests; for others, content matters far more than form.  Mostly, I tell my students that they need to become flexible writers–like the gears in a car–shift to the format that will get you where you want to go.  Same for us teachers.

Curriculum guides, Standards, workbooks are fine for beginning teachers or those who don’t really have a grasp on their subject.  But if you’re lucky enough to teach what you love, demonstrate to the students why you’ve given your life to this work.  Less is definitely more when creating teaching units.  Figure out those big ideas that will help the kids have choices and reach their goals.  Keep focusing on the fact that you’re teaching people, not subjects, so make the curriculum match their needs.  Some will need help with standardized tests.  Some will need help staying in school.  Some will need help seeing the point of what you teach.   All will need help to become life-long writers.

As I said goodbye to the teachers in Cynthia’s workshop, I encouraged them to trust their instincts and begged them not to give up.  We need teachers like these who care enough to work on their craft so they can inspire their students.  I’m honored to call them my colleagues.

Last week I endured what had to be one of the worst professional experiences of my life, and that’s saying something since I’ve been a teacher for over 30 years now.  I live in a state that is bankrupt–services have been slashed, jobs have been lost, paranoia abounds.  I lost a great deal of faith in politicians and their ability to solve problems a long time ago, so mostly I concentrate on local issues and on helping my students make the best choices they can.  I taught in public schools in California and Tennessee for 21 years, but worked for a number of years outside of that system when I took a job at a private school that offered me housing and a way to move back to California.  Last year I accepted a position as a consultant to help a small district start up a K-12 charter school and was happy to find myself back in the public school system.  I love the fact that one of our country’s goals is to educate everyone, regardless of income, neighborhood, or readiness.  We teachers embrace every child that enters our classroom and do the best we can to help them advance towards their goals.  Particularly now, I so appreciate anyone who is willing to take up this challenge because I know how difficult this job can be.

In working with the administrators of the charter school–an idealistic, inspirational group–I agreed to teach one class to help gain credibility with the teachers for whom I was a mentor.  I was happy to do this because I love the time I spend with my students.  However, mid-year I was told that I could not teach the following year unless I brought my credential up-to-date by taking a test to prove that I was competent to work with students whose primary language was not English.  This made me roll my eyes a bit since I have worked with ELL (English Language Learners)  in my classes since my student teaching days in San Jose, but the California Department of Education had determined that passing a six-hour test would reveal my qualifications far more accurately than my experience, degrees, and honors.  We teachers are used to the yearly mandates that require X-amount of in-service hours listening to presentations on whichever topic has been embraced as the quick-fix of the season.  I expected this CTEL exam to be more of the same.

I was wrong.  In a year when my little school district had to figure out how to slash millions from their bare-bone budget, they were required to cough up $10,000 for a 50-hour workshop for 16 experienced teachers who lacked the proper credential saying they were qualified to work with ELL students.  Each teacher needed to pay out-of-pocket $300 to register for the test, $55 to apply for the credential, and $45 to be finger-printed to prove we were who we said we were.  We missed a total of four days of school to attend the Thursday-Sunday sessions that were scheduled for two consecutive weeks, making an exhausting 14 straight days of work for the full-time teachers (plus they needed to prepare lesson plans for their substitutes and study for the upcoming test).  The test was scheduled for the day after our last day of school and the nearest testing centers were 200 miles away, requiring us to either car pool at 5 a.m. to make the 8:00 start time or pay for a hotel room.  On the day of the test, approximately 300 of us were herded into a high school in the Los Angeles area; it’s important to remember that this was one of thirteen test centers in the state.  I could go on about the prison-like atmosphere, over-the-top security measures, and stress-inducing testing conditions, but in truth, our students are required to study in classrooms like this every day.  I’m actually a pretty good test-taker, but after three separate test modules consisting of 150 multiple choice questions and four essays, I gave up in the fifth hour and just walked out.  I had no idea if I passed or not, and at the time, I didn’t really care.

Some good has come of this.  I have a greater sympathy for my high school students who face high-stakes testing several times a year.  I have been reminded that a portfolio which contains a body of work is a far more useful assessment than a one-time test.  I have been reenergized to work to reform education, something I haven’t felt for a long-time.  The system is out of whack–it doesn’t take a scan-sheet to figure that out.  Decisions that impact the classroom should be made on the local level.  Educators, not accountants looking for numbers on a spread sheet, should determine what is needed to help our students achieve.  Teachers should be treated like professionals, and to do this, we have to support changes in the tenure system that allows incompetent teachers to keep their jobs.  When I sat in the workshop and the test for the CLAD credential, I felt like I was being punished.  It occurred to me later on that this was a lame attempt to get rid of the dead weight under the assumption that a good teacher should also be a good test taker.

Let’s take it a step further.  Studies have shown that a student’s grades (or to put it another way, track record) in high school are the best predictor of how that student will fare in college–the UC system has tried to eliminate SAT scores from its admission process.  Last year my students took a total of four standardized tests–I found one, taken in both the fall and spring, to be useful.  The NWEA test is online, relatively inexpensive, and can be administered in 50 minutes per subject area.  Teachers can access the results in a week.  On the other hand, the STAR tests, which ate up a week of instructional time, require a mountain of test booklets–3 per student–that cannot be used again.  The teachers can access the students’ scores only after the kids have moved on from their classes.  The more I thought about this, getting rid of all but the NWEA would save millions and millions of dollars.  If we dumped the state-mandated workshops and provided professional development on the local level based on the needs of the teachers, well, we could balance the state budget, rehire the pink-slipped teachers and staff, and focus our time, money, and effort on educating our children.  If a teacher is struggling, we should have the resources available in that teacher’s district to offer help.  If the teacher is not cut out for the profession, we should have an effective, efficient and fair way of replacing him or her.

It’s getting harder and harder to entice people to become teachers–we set up hoop after hoop for them to jump through.  I spent part of my time in the workshop and at the test site trying to encourage people to hang in there and not leave the profession.  I can think of no more difficult and no more rewarding job than teaching.  To attract the best, we must treat teachers like trusted, respected professionals.  We don’t need more one-size-fits-all tests.  We need competent administrators who have the time and the means to provide their teachers with the tools they need to excel in the classroom.  Teachers need to be accountable, but it should be a local accountability—the students, their parents, and fellow teachers know who is doing a good job in the classroom and who should be replaced.  We should radically simplify the system for funding schools so superintendents do not have to wait breathlessly for the legislature to decide what to do each year.  America has fallen behind the rest of the world in standardized test scores, but it leads the world in our desire that all of our citizens have the right to a free, quality education.  We can do this without leaving any children or teachers behind.

Every once in a while I will read about something that happens in the world that either makes me feel helpless in the face of such sorrow or disgusted.  Lately I decided that if I had the power to reprogram human nature, the one trait I would delete would be greed.  I used to focus on eliminating war, poverty, senseless violence, but if you think about it, these all stem from greed.  I can think of little that is positive emerging from our country’s current financial free fall, but I woke up this morning like Pandora peeking into the box.  I saw a glimmer of hope.

At the beginning of every school year, I ask my students to tell me what career they would like to pursue later in their lives, then I make big posters that group my students’ names by profession and post those at the front of the room.  I refer to them often as I teach to help the students focus on the fact that the reading, writing, and thinking we do in our class will be, not just useful, but essential to their future success.  When I’m working on the posters, I have to make sure to leave a lot of room for “Pro Sports” because I know many of my students will declare that as their dream job.  However, in the last 10 years, “Business” has challenged sports as the number one goal.  I always ask, “What kind of business?”  It rarely matters.  “Just business, I want to make as much money as possible.”  I tell them that money, like fame, is never the goal, it’s the byproduct–then I pause dramatically–”like sludge.”  I make sure that when we talk about the Hero’s Journey, the students understand that one of the ways you know you’re on the right path is that your “fulfillment”–that which you seek–improves your life, but also improves the lives of others.  If your guides are mentors, they will offer insights that lead you to your authentic self.  If your guides are demons, you will lose your way.

The idea that comforted me this morning is that the people who have based their lives on greed and the belief that money will provide the respect and power they lack in their personal lives are now the villains.  My students see this when they turn on the television, listen to the radio, and glance at the headlines.  Maybe, just maybe, this group of teenagers will choose careers that will allow them to support themselves and their families, but will also bring out the best in them–the best in human nature.  It will not make up for the devastation that has occurred in their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, but it could help them choose a path worth taking.

When I choose the books/stories/articles my students will read, I try to find seemingly disparate works and ask the kids to make connections.  We just finished linking the themes of The Odyssey to Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories.  The kids understand that these (and all stories) are about the myths on which we base our lives.  Rushdie shows them how all stories stem from the ancient stories, and it is possible that the myths that survive are true.  And from these lofty ideas, I can help them learn to block out an essay, fine-tune their punctuation choices, expand the scope of their vocabulary, and figure out ways to remember what they read.  Reading, writing, and thinking.

Last week an off-hand comment agitated me enough to connect it to several other ideas floating around in my head.  It all has to do with figuring out ways to teach with passion.  It started with Obama’s speech on Tuesday in which he challenged us to roll up our sleeves and try harder to turn our country around.  Next, I was talking to a gifted, experienced teacher who felt it was too much pressure to ask a first-year teacher to design lessons from her passion.  Then last night, Kam and I watched the last episode of the fifth-season of The Wire.  In the Features section of the DVD, we listened to various writers, producers, directors, and actors of the series talk about their desire to create a TV program worth watching.  One advisor said that The Wire unflinchingly exposed what is broken about our schools, law enforcement, government, families in this country, and she hoped that someone would watch and figure out a way to fix this mess.  This is why I’ve stayed in teaching so long.  If we could afford to place our hopes and energy into only one area, I believe it should be schools.  Many of the problems and solutions can be addressed right there.  We can’t go into the homes to straighten out the families, but we can use our classrooms as a place to inspire the next set of parents.  They’re sitting right in front of us. 

If we keep in mind that even at a very young age, everything we model in our classes will either make the kids decide that education is boring or, even worse, irrelevant, or we can inspire the kids to use the skills we are teaching to improve their lives and the lives of others.  We start with our own children, then other people’s children.  We can’t change everything, but we can influence the kids sitting in our classrooms to develop an image of themselves at their best and to make plans for a future that nurtures that best.  And it starts with what we demonstrate every single day when we stand in front of these kids.  To inspire to next generation, we have to be inspired ourselves, and the only way I know how to do that is to approach my job with passion.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the immensity of the sea.”  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I’ve been revising my first book over the past few days and have been struck by how much I’ve changed as a teacher (and a writer) in just ten years.  Some of the routines I used in my classes seem rather naive, and I’m squirming at how often I describe “heated arguments” with colleagues.  I don’t do that anymore.  I’ve found far smoother ways to work through roadblocks, but in my defense, for many years I taught students who struggled with reading and writing–some with serious behavior problems–and I was overly protective of these souls who made up the bottom rung of the educational system.

I’ve also been working with an inspiring group of teachers who make up the small staff of the charter school in a small public school district nearby.  Some of these teachers have little experience, others have been around for awhile, but what they share is an amazing amount of energy and worthwhile goals.  We will go through the accreditation process this year, so we’ve had to make sure that our courses match the state standards and the UC system rubrics.  I agree that there has to be a bottom line–some kind of system in place to verify that progress is being made by the students as they tackle a wide variety of skills.  However, we can become so focused on the tiny steps that we miss the big leaps forward.

In making up our course descriptions, I encouraged the teachers to keep the big picture in view by identifying the “Big Questions,” many of which cannot be definitively answered, and by pushing the students to grasp how useful the specific skills will be as they tackle the puzzle of their futures.  This year I placed six challenges before my ninth grade students: 

What and why should I read?

How do I make my writing worth reading?

What do I need to memorize?

How do I locate what I need to know?

What are the beliefs on which I base my life?

Why was I put on this Earth and what am I going to do about it?

I should think that will keep us occupied for ten months.  I also ask the teachers to stay focused on what made them fall in love with their subject in the first place so that the students will leave their classes with a clear idea of the passion behind the facts.  Or as T. S. Eliot would say, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”

On the third day of school, I had the students in my 9th grade English class do an activity where they had to make assumptions about another student–low-risk things like favorite type of food, music, movies, etc.  The kids enjoyed the activity and for homework, wrote a journal entry about the experience.  They also described a time that assumptions had gotten them into trouble and a time when assumptions (or good instincts) had kept them out of trouble. 

Yesterday I showed them how to use the thoughts in their journals to create a thesis statement for an academic essay on assumptions–they could argue either way:  1) Although assumptions can help us avoid dangerous situations, however, we must be careful of what we assume about other people because assumptions can lead to stereotypes, prejudices, and lost opportunities, or 2) Although assumptions can lead to prejudices and stereotypes, however, we need to make some assumptions based on our instincts because reasonable assumptions can help us avoid dangerous situations.

I like that this “although, however, because” formula forces the kids to address both points of view.  I begin the lesson with one of my favorite quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”  This quote becomes one of the major themes of our class as we discuss cultural, political, and religious beliefs different from our own.  I make sure to tell the kids that they do not have to agree with an opposing point of view, but they should at least be able to present it clearly.

Their homework for this Labor Day weekend is to take five topics–dress code, the election process, survival of the fittest, lab testing on animals, and video games–and create two thesis statements for each:  one “for” and one “against.”  When I presented this assignment, I wore my button that says, “How far can I open my mind before my brains fall out?”  Pretty far, my dears, pretty far.

“I love power.  But it is as an artist that I love it.  I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.”

I’ve been trying to help a public school system start up a charter school; it opens in just  a few weeks and right now the task seems overwhelming.  After almost 30 years, I had no intention of working in a high school again, but the people behind this endeavor are so enthusiastic and idealistic that I threw my hat in before I realized what I was doing.  I’m a sucker for projects that seem impossible to pull off.  If the cause is worthy, the people sincere, and the path not yet paved, I’m in.  I once heard someone say, “Just because something is impossible is not a good enough reason not to try.”  Despite the flagrant double negatives, ’tis true, ’tis true.  Or as I say to new teachers, “If this job were easy, anyone could do it.”  It’s all about the vision and the faith.

Yesterday I spent some time with a man who returned to college after many years of working outside of education to get his teaching credential.  I truly admire his energy, dedication, and creativity.  He’s going to be a great teacher, but we just need to get him through his first year.  We’ve spent time arranging and rearranging furniture, but the real focus has been on developing a classroom management program that will work for him.  I can show him what I do, but he has to find what makes sense to him.  I’m enjoying the process–watching the wheels turn as he listens to my advice and either asks questions or lights up with the great “Aha!”  That’s one of my favorite parts of teaching–watching the struggle transform into a workable idea that now belongs to the learner and not to me.

Any discussion of classroom management will always turn to the topic of power or control.  I believe that teachers who are successful in creating a classroom where real learning takes place understand the nature of true power.  Without a doubt, the teacher needs to take control of a classroom before the opening bell rings.  The students should leave their first session with the sense that the teacher is clearly in charge and has a plan.  New teachers receive all sorts of advice as to how to do this.  Most have been told to start out strict then lighten up as the year unfolds.  This can work if the teacher has convinced the students early on that s/he has the students’ best interests at heart and has created a curriculum worth learning.  However, I’ve seen this “don’t smile until Christmas” approach backfire horribly if the power being wielded by the teacher is false; most students can spot a person pretending to have power within the first few minutes of class.

False power relies on threats designed to make the students afraid to misbehave.  I’ve seen coaches who can pull this off, but often they have a deeper relationship with a number of influential students based on their shared experiences on the athletic field.  But a teacher who relies on shouts, physical intimidation, or public humiliation will maintain control of a class as long as that level of fear is maintained.  This, of course, is exhausting; this kind of control works only as long as the teacher is focused on making it work.  The reason this type of power is labeled “false” is that it disappears as soon as the teacher turns his/her back or relaxes for a minute.  True power is where the students behave because they choose to.  They feel they have a stake in what will happen in this class and are anxious to learn what is being taught.  The climate of the classroom quickly moves from teacher control to self control.  False power controls physical actions; true power changes people’s minds.  My job is to help the teachers tell the difference.  Such interesting work.