“Garbage.”

“Disaster.”

“Stinkolicious.”

“BRILLIANT!”

Teaching grading papers often seem to forget everything they know about teaching: students who (in class) engender sympathy, patience, and compassion earn nasty epithets – behind closed doors, of course.

Why is it so frustrating to grade students’ writing?

Teachers often say they want to help their students become independent learners. But a lot of the techniques you learn during teacher training or on the job, encourage dependence on the teacher. Students do not always come to class with study skills and increasingly, social skills either. The bleak choice is to do the heavy lifting for them to avoid problems in lessons or risk wasting time on non-subject specific skills.

I think it’s worth a shot to try to get them to leave the nest! Here are some skills that I like explicitly teaching at the start of a new term.

• A student sees a classmate who is lost or confused. Without being asked, he offers assistance.

• A student runs into a problem in a lab, and instead of immediately putting up her hand, she attempts to solve the problem on her own.

• A student has a setback on a quiz, but rather than give up, concluding that the class is dumb and the quizzes are impossible, she comes in for extra coaching.

Much has been written about traits like “Grit,” “Resilience,” and the ability to delay gratification – and the linking of these traits to long term success.

I was speaking with my new team of teachers about collaboration and what it looked like for them at previous schools. The responses shared were not at all what I had hoped. I’m not sure what it is about the teacher mindset, but we sometimes forget how much power comes from conversation with others. Why is it that doors are closed and ideas are “secret”? Are we all not working towards the same goal to “Better OUR students for the future”? Notice I capitalized ‘our’ because yes, they are all ours. No one can change the world on their own. We have to come together, unite and work as one. Here are a few things my team tries to do to improve collaboration:

The hardest thing about lesson planning is the blank page.

And the hardest thing about starting class is that when students enter the room, unless you make it so, your classroom is a blank page. Sure, you have posters on the wall, and you’re midway through a unit.

But unless your posters and unit are as interesting as whatever the students were talking and thinking about it the hallway on the way to class (and let’s face it, to most students, it’s not) the students walk in the room with their own agenda. The agenda is: try not to do anything.

“All beginnings are difficult.”

I remember the horrendous, red track-suit I wore on the the first day of sixth grade – and discovering that it did very little for my social cache.

I remember the anxiety of the first day of fifth grade; I was terrified I’d be assigned to the homeroom of the witchy-looking lady I’d seen in the hallways and I prayed I’d get the the tall, gangly guy. I got my wish, but it turned out that the tall, gangly guy was sort of mean. The witchy-looking lady, I later learned, only looked witchy.

I remember the first day of fourth grade, where our teacher introduced us to an octopus, pickled in a jar of formaldehyde. It lived in his supply closet. If he caught anyone messing with his supplies, he said, he’d lock us in there with “Octy.”

All beginnings are difficult.

It all started with a peanut.

The teacher was offering salty, shelled peanuts to students who answered questions correctly. It was my turn and she asked me the question, something about verbs. Or adverbs. I blurted out the answer, and hands shot up; I watched in horror as the teacher called on another student to answer and give him the peanut. My peanut.

The worst part was that the second I said the wrong answer, I realized my error… but I could do nothing about it. My peanut was gone.

Right from the start, ClassDojo has been built on feedback from teachers, parents, and students; your thoughtful ideas and suggestions have helped improve ClassDojo time and time again. Thanks to you, over 45 million students are now learning the character strengths and behaviors they need to be successful in life: things like persistence, curiosity, creativity and leadership. We believe that connecting teachers, parents, and students to improve understanding of how students are developing is a wonderful thing – and we’re excited to be able to help!

Similarly, we believe that improving understanding between you — the teachers and parents we work with every day — and us, the ClassDojo team, is just as important.

Picture this: You’ve built a great PLN (Professional Learning Network) using social media. You have lots of ideas about how you can use technology in your classroom. You’ve tried some new activities and want to share them with other teachers in your school… but they aren’t interested. What can you do to create a school culture that embraces technology?

For teachers, therapy isn’t a terrible idea.

Let me back up. Many psychoanalysis programs require new practitioners-in-training to undergo a course of analysis of their own.

The rationale makes sense: journeying with the patient through the muck and mire, the fear and anger and pain, can cause memories to bubble up, complicated feelings, in the analyst. The analyst’s needs and emotions, however, are not relevant in the therapeutic encounter – they can undermine the therapeutic relationship.

The analyst needs to learn how to keep memory and emotion in check – to deal with them appropriately.

True, also, for parents.