Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from High School Students mislead me. The title and premise conjured a picture of a superficial book that gave mostly obvious and angst filled ideas padded by some feel good support from the author. That was not the case at all.
Fires in the Bathroom is actually a level headed, thorough, and well organized text for new teachers. Cushman and her student collaborators spent countless hours working on the material for this book. In fact, there is even a chapter at the end of the book about how they made the book. All of the student insights were organized into ten chapters with focuses such as knowing students, teaching difficult material, classroom behavior, respect, motivation, and ELL. While the chapter formatting doesn't make a riveting read, subheadings, lists, charts, tons of student quotations, and bulleted chapter summaries make it extremely easy to follow. Also included are ready-to-use worksheets; some of them are for student use, but the authors designed most of these to aid teachers in reflecting on their practices. Some of these worksheets are helpful, but others are overkill. For example, anyone who would take the time to fill out "Am I Playing Favorites?" probably is reflective enough to already know the results.
This book is very obviously written for new teachers. Much of the student advice in the first chapters of the books can also be found in Wong's The First Days of Schools. Ideally, this text should be read during course work leading up to student teaching or before starting at one's first position, but as a teacher with five years under my belt, I still found many useful ideas. However, a large portion of the suggestions are painfully obvious. For example, the first chapter on knowing your students provided an opportunity to reflect on my relationships with students, but it also cautioned against drawing conclusions about students based on what I've seen in the media, which to me, is common sense. Obvious suggestions like these are found throughout the text.
I only noticed a couple problems with the text besides it stating many common sense ideas. First, early in the book, the author states that all the suggestions were presented for authenticity sake, but that veteran teachers would know that some of these ideas aren't practical or plausible. Thus, some advice could yield negative results with the best of intentions, such as suggestions to let students teach the class to see from the teacher's point of view or putting too much emphasis on getting to know students and individual progress, which could backfire by affecting fairness. While the student authors' ideas needed to be respected for this project, it seems a little counterproductive for a book for new teachers to not take advantage of what veteran teachers would know. The second problem with the text was much smaller. Some of the information is skewed by the fact that the students involved were from urban, diverse schools. For teachers like myself who work in a rural community, our population is far more homogeneous than those discussed in the text, which made some of the advice not fit my community.
Despite these problems, there were lots of valuable suggestions and ideas. One of the best sections was the behavior management chapter, including tips for subs. I also liked the emphasis on revision and positive feedback. The advice on assessment was very clear: spell out what you're looking for, give examples of product at different levels, use a rubric, and give opportunity to revise. Additionally, I enjoyed the section on motivating students. It included insightful student comments about the conformity of eduction and the right question inspiring them to learn. One of my favorite suggestions was to have a department test day so that students don't become overwhelmed with multiple tests and assignments on one day; however, all the other information on scheduling indicated that it is never a good time for pretty much anything. The homework section contained information that should be common sense: Only assign homework that is meaningful learning, don't over do it, and provide support. The reading and writing section was short, but a very good representation of the information I learned in my master's program.
The most shocking aspect of this book was the teacher behavior described by some of the students. Some behavior defied the common sense of how to deal with people while other behavior showed a complete lack of compassion and fairness that made me question how some of these teachers entered the profession. One of the most common comments in the book was that teachers won't call on a students who aren't the go-to student of the class. How can a teacher not call on the quite kid who finally raises his hand? Also mentioned were teachers who rudely blew off real questions about the subject, not because they were inappropriately timed, but because they weren't seen as valid questions.
For me, I walked away thinking about the following points:
- I need to get to know my students more. While at the beginning of the year I always collect information about my students, I often don't wind up using it because its just too hard to keep track of 100+ students and integrate it into lessons. But, I do need to learn more about them, especially in terms of their struggles and accomplishments. I want to know about more of the complicated issues in students' lives, but I don't see how to without being invasive. What sticks out to me the most are cases when I discovered at the end of the year that smart kids were struggling because of a divorce. I also learned through FB that a student was away for a year, then back because she had a child. This particularly bothers me because I was left to make the assumption that it was other issues in her life that I did know about that kept her from school. If I had taken a greater interest in this student, I could have had a clearer picture of why she was struggling.
- A trait that I have always admired in other teachers is how they can pull a student into the hall to talk about an incident that just occurred in class. I haven't been able to do that. In fact, I almost never talk to students about their behavior, whether its talking or not turning in work. This is something I need to work on when I return to teaching.
- I want to continue to give students both silent time and time to collaborate on all types of work. My experience matched the student comments.
- I need to evaluate how group work progresses. In the past, I wasn't very good at really seeing how groups were working. While there is no real excuse in my mind for cheating and plagiarism, poor group work conditions were the root the most frustrating cases I encountered. This would also includes time when students are informally collaborating, such during writing workshop time.
- I want to give more attention in my feedback to what and how students did well, so they can be repeated it next time. I've done alright with this at times with writing assignments, but could do better; I need to work on it for all the other areas in the classroom.
- I was glad to see the comments that grades should be advice for next time. The students involved in this project seemed most interested in learning and the feedback that would allow them to succeed at learning. The grading fiasco I had my last year teaching really had a lot to do with this idea.
- I need to remember that some kids won't turn in work if they don't think it is done right.
- I've always asked students to ask questions, but I've had trouble getting kids who really need help to ask. I need to continue to work on ways to get kids to feel safe enough to ask questions which make them feel vulnerable, especially questions dealing with understanding. I wonder what portion of my apathetic students behave that way because they don't understand and can't ask for help?
- I want to provide opportunities for students to do work they feel proud of. I feel that this happens for only a small fraction of my students and its those who don't feel proud of their work that continue to fail.
- More than once a comment was made about being the only student who every answered teachers' questions and that the whole class rides on that one student. I can't imagine being that student who is the only one who ever does the work or talks, but I've had that happen many times. I always force other students to participate by refusing to let that those few eager students continue to lead the class once they've contributed once or twice in a row. I'm surprised more teachers don't do this, but at the same time not surprised because sometimes the silence is very uncomfortable and it means halting the lesson and trying a totally new approach, like writing down question or comments for me to collect and share anonymously.
- The importance of choice and personal relevance were mentioned more than once. I've done a lot of work on choice that I would like to keep up, and I hope that those choices add personal relevance, but I don't think it always does. How do I help students choose meaningful topics when students know themselves the best? Sometimes kids make really bad choices, not so much with choosing books to read, but with writing and research topics.
- One comment that I found particularly interesting was that students find it hard and frustrating when they are given freedom and responsibility after having information forced on them for years. This goes along with my above comment about students being stumped by free choice.
