Certifiable?

My wife thought I was lame for crashing in front of the TV every night for the past few weeks watching the winter Olympics. Little did she know I was gleaning valuable lessons as I set my sights on NBPTS gold.

One lesson came while watching the replays of the men’s Super G. Big sweeping turns and the speed of the downhill combine in an event where, despite hitting speeds of 70 mph, the outcome is decided by hundredths of a second. Through the magic of digital editing, the runs of the gold and silver medalists were superimposed over one another at the conclusion of the race. Though they’d raced at different moments, both men were shown shussing through the gates side by side. Suddenly, it became apparent where those miniscule fragments of time had been lost. The slower man’s turns were just a bit wider and lower on the hill; he lingered in the air a moment longer going over a roll.

What struck me was how much understanding can be gained by rewatching an event. This relates to the board certification process, of course, because we are asked to tape ourselves teaching, and then reflect. How simple. Yet when, with the papers flying and the next day’s lessons to plan, do we teachers ever stop to catch our breath and really observe closely our last run. Where did we cut a gate too close? What was our best turn of the race?

The most recent assignment in the prep class was to tape our class. This wasn’t an Olympic run, mind you, just a practice session. Find a camera, figure out how to set it up in the room and turn the darn thing on. Don’t worry yet about finding ten perfect minutes, our instructors wisely told us. Just make sure you’re not shooting into fluorescent lights or failing to record sound. I did it today, and I can assure you, I followed their advice to a tee. My footage isn’t perfect; probably not even usable. But I captured myself and my kids in our natural habitat. And that’s a start.

My next Olympic lesson has to do with twizzles. Those are the tandem twirls performed by pint-sized ice dancers and their graceful partners between acrobatic triple leaps. The twizzles look easy in comparison. But woe to the couple that is not in sync — Dick Button, stylish medalist of yesteryear and now a stickler of a color commentator, will point out the wobble to the world while keen-eyed judges mercilessly deduct fractions of a point.

Twizzles, to me, are the little things that teachers do in between the big things. The difficulty of keeping a class running smoothly is seldom noted, in part because when it’s done right it’s unnoticeable. When do you hand out the assignment, how are the desks configured, can Suzie go to the bathroom? Countless details are negotiated every lesson. During this certification process, we will in effect become our own Dick Buttons, bringing to the attention of our audience the meticulous but generally underappreciated efforts that keep us and our twenty-five dance partners in sync.

The last lesson I learned from the Olympics was from biathletes. Ski, ski, ski, shoot… again and again, over many kilometers and until your heart’s about to burst. In the finals of one of the events, the unfavored Italian team managed a remarkable win. Their third leg broke away from a tight pack with a heroic uphill climb, giving his anchor man such a commanding lead that the Tourinians were already celebrating by the time the race concluded. The home team triumphed! The “Olympic spirit” so elusive to spoiled, hot-dogging and bickering Americans overflowed from my TV set and washed over me as I lay prone on the beige couch.

The lesson here was simple: keep skiing, no matter what hills pop up in front of you. And, when it’s time to pause and shoot, take a deep breath, ignore the pounding in your ears, and do what you’ve trained so long and hard to do. You might not hit the bull's eye every single time. Just worry about the shot you’re on. The gold will take care of itself.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? This question of cosmic choreography, long the realm of medieval rabbis and more recently of interest to Madonna, a famous celebrity convert to the strain of Jewish mysticism known as cabbalah, suddenly seems more important to me than it did before I started on the path to National Board enlightenment.

You see, the National Board’s Standards alone run to about 90 pages. (These are sort of like the Ten Commandments, except there are sixteen of them, identified by Roman numerals.) Download and print the instructions for the portfolio, and you add another bible thick three-ring to the pile on your desk.

Granted, I’m not sure the holy Box spoken of by my already ordained colleagues is quite what it used to be. In years before one waited to receive the novitiate’s treasure trove by snail mail. Now all divine guidance comes by a single cd rom.

Numerology in cabbalah assigns values to letters, and so reveals mathematical patterns in scriptural phrases. NBPTS has its own arcana. For instance, the fourth portfolio entry, I found out last class, should be twelve pages long and demonstrate achievement across three standards by discussing eight accomplishments within three distinct categories. (As described in the NBPTS instructions for Entry 4: the standards are: X. Reflective Practice, XI. Linkages with Families, and XII. Professional Leadership; the three “categories” are: as a partner with students’ families and their community, as a learner, and as a leader or collaborator.) When mailed in, I’m pretty sure all this must be submitted under the seventh seal.

“It’s all teacher-written,” our instructors assure us. Composition by committee instead of divine hand may account for the use of words like “Linkages” instead of “Links,” or that “Linkages with Families” is assigned Roman numeral XI in the “English as a New Language” certification area, but is given a different name and Roman numeral in the Adolescence and Young Adulthood category (XVI. Family and Community Involvement).

Hopefully it also means that the standards, awkwardly packaged as they may be, speak to some fundamental truths about our profession. Once I have studied them more deeply I may have some answers. Until then, I and the other experienced teachers starting this quest for self-improvement feel as Madonna probably did at her first session with a bearded Talmudic scholar.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Am I nuts? Can I do it? I am a 13-year teacher about to take on one of the toughest challenges the profession has to offer--national-board certification--and this blog will chronicle the effort. So far, I’ve been to a couple meetings of a five-session introductory class offered by Fairfax County to would-be candidates. A few steps into what they warn us may be a 600-hour journey.

From a distance, the requirements look simple, like a snow-capped peak against a clear blue sky: four portfolio entries including a couple videotapes of me teaching, and a day of computer-center tests. But this mountain has claimed more than a few of us.

Less than a third of those who go for board certification nationally achieve it on the first try. And, while over 40,000 teachers have passed the test since its inception in 1993, in my state, Virginia, there are currently fewer than 1000 active board-certified teachers. New York has about half that number.

So why bother? A board-certified colleague of mine who I’ll call the Artful Roger for his ability to get a lot done without appearing to sweat boiled it down to five words: 50 grand over ten years. For me, a teacher-writer whose epitaph may well be, “Read widely, paid little,” that kind of a bump is hard to resist.

But it’s more than the money, of course. It’s a chance to answer that question that gnaws at every one of us who stands in front of kids, day after day, and professes to wisdom: Am I a fraud?

Reading a chapter five minutes before they come in the door or trying to be interested in a stack of third quarter essays that I can almost grade without reading is not teacher of the year stuff. But it’s real.

Fortunately, the other stuff is real, too. Like when pulseless seniors reading Margaret Edson’s Wit come alive when the heroine recites a John Donne sonnet I made them “translate” before reading the play. Or when ninth graders make a poster about The Perfect Storm all covered with blue crepe paper and little fishing rods made out of sticks and pieces of yarn that cleverly underline examples of imagery from the text.

So, am I nuts? Can I do it? I’ll seek answers over the course of the next year in this blog. And as to that last one: Why bother? I can beat Roger by two words. Because it’s there.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (33)