March 2019 – Roe's Rules

Is THAT Student a Perfectionist?

You’ve just introduced students to the idea of subtraction with regrouping. You’ve put the students into small groups to work together to solve 5 problems. Aaron has contorted himself around his chair and appears to be playing with something – whatever it is, he is not interacting with his group. He spots you looking at him and he immediately asks if he can sharpen his pencils. You gently say, “No, Aaron. It is time to work with your group on the regrouping problems.” Aaron pouts and crosses his arms in a huff. Inwardly, you sigh. You’ve seen this behavior over and over again.

One possible explanation for Aaron’s behavior is that he is a perfectionist.

We often think of perfectionists as supremely confident individuals to whom most things seem to come easily. We think of perfectionism as ultimately leading to success. The truth is these stereotypes are rarely, if ever, true.

Perfectionists are often anxious and fearful. They fear being seen as a failure. These fears can manifest themselves in the classroom in many ways.

Doesn’t take risks in learning
This is the student to always seems to keep to the easier “stuff”. He will choose books below his instructional reading level. She will copy others’ creative or open-ended answers for fear of having a product or answer that is different from others.
Avoids tasks, especially challenging new work
This is the student who seems to ask to use the bathroom whenever he is asked to do something new in a subject. She regularly starts a different task or continues with a previous task instead of what she was asked to do.
Gives up easily
This is the student who declares, “This is stupid” and gives up. She huffs and pouts and becomes stubborn.
Is exceptionally slow when working
This is the student who draws each letter in a sentence in slow motion. She seems to take forever to get anything done.
Has a meltdown when mistakes are pointed out or when s/he makes a mistake
This is the student who has us tiptoeing around telling him about what he got wrong because we are afraid he will throw a temper tantrum, or she will start shouting and overturning desks.
Uses diversionary tactics
This is the student who tried to get you and the class off-task or off topic. She will ask questions that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. He knows what can get the teacher off on a different subject, telling stories, or reminiscing about something else. When he is successful, the lesson stalls and suddenly it is the end of the class period or it is time for a “special”.
Procrastinates
The student avoids getting started on an assignment or project, or simply doesn’t hand something in. She figures that if she doesn’t get started she won’t be up against the possibility of failure. If he never handed anything in, he can say, “I could have done great on that, but it just wasn’t worth my time.”

Many students are often masters at hiding their perfectionism. We think he can’t possibly be a perfectionist because he doesn’t dress or groom himself well, his desk or locker or backpack is a disaster area, his handwriting is sloppy, or he loses things with alarming regularity. It fits with the stereotypes we have about perfectionists when we think a student cannot be a perfectionist because she is not “perfect” in every area of her life. Yet perfectionists often seek “perfection” in only one or a few aspects of his/her life

How can you spot a perfectionist?

Look for the behaviors above and watch for patterns in behavior. Being slow at completing an assignment once can be attributed to having a bad day. Twice might be a coincidence, but three times can be a pattern.
Examine your own stereotypes about perfectionists.
Think about why a student might demonstrate a particular behavior in that particular time and in that particular place. What is she attempting to get or avoid with the behavior. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking “she just wants attention”. Attention-getting behaviors quite often are far more complex than a simple bid for attention. We have to ask ourselves why he wants that kind of attention at that particular moment.

What can I do if I think one or more of my students are perfectionists?

Model making mistakes
When I first started teaching, I would be horrified if I made a mistake when students could see it. I came to realize that often children do not have particularly good role models for making mistakes. They may have adults in their lives who do not ever seem to make mistakes, or who use any or all of the coping strategies listed above. It can be empowering for students to see an adult make mistakes without the world coming to an end.
Model how to recover from making mistakes.
Showing students that you can laugh at your mistakes or that you can learn from them is a valuable lesson for them. I used to tell students to carefully watch what I was writing on the board and to try to catch me in making a spelling mistake. It provided an opportunity to apply phonics skills and kept students engaged, even if they were only engaged in seeing if I goofed. When I student caught me in a spelling error, I would ask the student to spell the word for me while I corrected my mistake on the board. Then I’d write his name on the board with a tally mark after it. At the end of the lesson, or the day, or the week (it depended on the age of the students), I would ask everyone who caught me in a mistake to take a bow while the class gave them a round of applause.
Demonstrate thinking about how to learn from mistakes.
Pretending to make a mistake when doing that subtraction with regrouping problem on the board, and thinking aloud about how to both recognize the mistake and how to learn from it helps students understand the process. Try marking papers with the number correct over the number possible on the page. For example, if there were 12 possible answers on an assignment and the student got 3 wrong, write 9/12 as the score rather than a percentage or a letter. This puts the focus on what the student did right and not on what s/he did wrong. Allow students to discuss with other students where they went wrong. You can try putting them into small groups based on what they got wrong (Everyone who got sidetracked with problem 11 meet here) or in mixed groups to review each part of an assignment. You can even have a discussion on what may have happened on a particular part of an assignment. For example, “I noticed that about half the class had difficulty with ___. Who will share with the class their strategy that helped them figure out what to do instead?” This latter can only happen in a class where students have become comfortable with making and learning from errors.
Anticipate common errors and show students how to avoid those.
Teachers can anticipate the ways that students will get new concepts wrong. With the subtraction with regrouping example, we can predict that students will make these common errors. If we can anticipate that someone will likely make these mistakes we can incorporate that into our lesson. For example, say, “A lot of times people get mixed up about how exactly to subtract with regrouping. I’m going to write some mixed up problems on the board and I want you to try to figure out where I went wrong. Now don’t get tricked!”

Did you spot the common subtraction errors? Check your work at the end of the blog!

Don’t get tricked vs. don’t make a mistake
Mistakes are scary to many students, but avoiding getting tricked is a game. When a teacher frames “mistakes” as trying to avoid getting tricked, it casts the possible mistake in the light of a puzzle. Children who might react negatively to making a mistake often see puzzles as fun to do, and delight in outwitting the task or teacher.
Try to set aside our own perfectionist tendencies.
Teachers are no different from other human beings. There are many of us who are perfectionists, who fear making mistakes, and who see our own fallibility as something shameful. We can convey those beliefs to students. If we are more comfortable with making mistakes, we can convey that attitude as well.

We often do not think of THAT student as a perfectionist yet that exact trait may be what makes THAT student do THAT. We can look for the signs of perfectionism and create a class culture that helps students cope with being imperfect and learning from our imperfections.

What went wrong with those subtraction problems?

61 – 17 = 56: The student subtracted the 1 from the 7, inverting the ones column.
62 – 17 = 58: The student added the ones column.
62 – 17 = 54: The student regrouped, subtracting 7 from 11, but did not write down the regrouping in the 10s column so he subtracted 10 from 60 instead of 10 from 50.
62 – 17 = 52: The student made the 1 a 10 and subtracted 7.
62 – 17 = 1: The student added 6+1 to get 7, and 1+7 to get 8. She then subtracted the smaller number (7) from the larger number (8) to get 1.

Is THAT Student Depressed?

Photo by Mohamed Abdelgaffar from Pexels

Depression in children is tricky to diagnose. Children who are depressed do not always have the same symptoms as adults.

The list of possible symptoms is long. Here I am going to look at those we are most likely to see at school.

Grouchy, crabby, or prickly and prone to anger
Some children act out when they are depressed. They take offense at the littlest thing. They grump and complain through the day, refusing to do this or that or becoming angry and shouting or saying something offensive.

Verbal outbursts or crying
The irritability can lead to children to talk back, blurt out, or even cry. Often these behaviors seem to come out of the blue and finding the antecedent is difficult.

Distractible or Short Attention Span
Almost all children distract easily and children do not have the attention span of an adult. One rule of thumb is that children usually have an attention span of their age in minutes. That is, a five year old would have about a five minute ability to focus, a ten year old would have ten minutes, etc. Children of any age must practice stamina to stick with an activity. A depressed child may have an even shorter attention span, or an uneven one where s/he can be focused for X minutes today but only half that tomorrow.

Social Withdrawal
A depressed child may pull away from his/her usual friends. S/he way stand on the sidelines during recess when s/he used to be actively engaged in kickball or swinging from the monkey bars. When working in small groups, s/he may be quiet, apparently day-dreaming instead of joining in.

Sensitive to Rejection
A depressed child may seem to over-react when s/he feels rejected. If a friend wants to play with someone else s/he may act out or cry. If s/he gets a low score on a test, s/he may act as if it is the end of the world. Things that other children are able shrug off seem to hit the depressed child like a ton of bricks.

Sometimes we pass these behaviors off as the child being immature for his/her age. We may characterize him/her as “needy” or “moody”.

Of course, all children demonstrate these symptoms from time to time. A child may be depressed if these behaviors persist. This is where is careful record-keeping can help.

There are many ways to keep track of children’s behaviors. Some teachers have a three ring binder with alphabet tabs and a sheet of paper for each child. Others keep a card file box with a card for each child.

I’m afraid those teachers are far more organized than I am. I learned to have a file folder for each child. I would jot down a thought or an observation about a child on any scrap of paper, date it and drop it into the file folder. When it was time to talk to a parent or colleagues about the child, I would take out the file and organize the slips of paper into chronological order. I could add to the information to expand on my chicken scratches.

You may have an entirely different system that works for you. The important thing is to jot down the behaviors you observe so that you can report it as needed.

If we see a child who persistently shows the behaviors, or some of the behaviors above, we can say, “Kathryn seems to be depressed.” We are not psychologists so we cannot diagnose, but we can express our concerns.

If we see some of the symptoms above, we do have an obligation to report them to the child’s parent and to ask for assistance from the school counselor or behavior intervention team.

Sadly, when I was a principal, I often saw children who seemed depressed who had gathered such a negative reputation that teachers labeled them as “bad”, “naughty”, or said the child didn’t care, or was doing this or that “because she just wants attention”.

Take a look at THAT student. Try to look past the frustration that you feel about his/her behaviors. Could s/he be depressed? Sometimes even just considering that there is a cause for the behavior aside from seeking attention or trying to deliberately get under the teacher’s skin can change how we feel about THAT child.

Decades of Progress

International Women’s Day was March 8. Contrary to what some commercials seem to say, it is not a day to wear pink ruffles and feel nurturing. It was started in 1909 as a celebration of women’s rights, and a way to advocate for more rights. The rights women agitated for at that time included being paid equal to men and the right to vote.

By 1900, women made up 75% of teachers. High schools were not as common as grades 1-8. Many schools had turned to female teachers in an effort to save money. At that time, women could be paid a fraction of what a man was paid, and they could be expected to clean the school as well.

In many areas, a woman could receive a teaching permit by passing a series of tests. In addition, she had to have people attest to her “deportment”, her behavior in the community. She was expected to dress modestly, avoid spending time with men especially if there was no chaperone, attend church, and remain single. She could be fired at the first hint of “immorality”.

I was not born in 1900 even though many of my students seemed to think I was a contemporary of Moses. I have, however lived through some significant changes in education with regards to women’s rights. In honor of International Women’s Day I would like to outline some of the changes I’ve seen during my lifetime. In addition, I would like to remind readers that none of these changes came from above. They were won by teachers fighting for those rights through their unions and, in some cases, through lawsuits.

When I was in high school, girls were required to wear dresses to school. We can thank Mary Ann Tinker , her brother, and her parents for filing a lawsuit against the Des Moines Board of Education for changes to the dress code. The Supreme Court’s ruling was the “students do no leave their Constitutional rights at the school house gate”.

This ruling affected many areas of schooling. For example, I was not allowed to take a drafting class in high school because drafting was for boys only, and, according to the teacher, “Your short skirts would distract the boys.” Girls were not allowed to take shop classes and boys did not take home economics classes. In the latter, we girls were taught to sew, cook, clean, and care for children. Shop and drafting classes were expected to teach boys skills they could use to get a job right out of high school.

In Illinois, I was not allowed to do certain jobs or play sports because of what was called “protective legislation”. That is, the state had passed laws that were supposedly designed to protect a woman’s smaller size and reproductive abilities. In the grocery store where I worked, I was not allowed to stock shelves, a higher paying job than working the cash register, because it would have required lifting more than 25 pounds, the limit placed on women. Playing sports would damage our ability to have babies, or so the lawmakers said. We could watch Iowa girls playing basketball and softball on TV, but Illinois would not allow it.

It was not until I was out of high school, in 1972, that Title 9 was passed. Among other things, Title 9 said that girls had to have equal opportunities for sports. Girls did not have to have the exact same sports available to them, but they needed to have something so that there was balance. For example, boys played football while girls played volleyball.

Schools were supposed to provide equal amounts of money to each sport. Some schools got around this requirement by using booster clubs to pay for “additional” expenses.

It was not until 1974 that female teachers won the right to be visibly pregnant in the classroom. Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, most school districts required women to stop teaching before the 4^th month of pregnancy and to remain on leave until the child was a specified age. Usually women were not guaranteed to be reinstated in the classroom. Instead, they were supposedly given “given priority in reassignment to a position for which she is qualified”. In other words, before the Supreme Court ruled on this, a woman had to quit teaching if she became pregnant and she couldn’t count on getting her job back again even with the required doctor’s certificate that she was healthy enough to work.

Newspaper article explaining the 1974 Supreme Court decision.

When I applied for my first job in 1978, I had several shocks.

The first came during my first interview. I met with the superintendent of schools. There was no committee or model lesson to teach. It was just the two of us with him asking questions and me nervously answering. I needed this job to support my husband and me! I was stunned when he asked me what kind of birth control I used. I must have looked at him strangely because he explained that he didn’t want to hire someone who would be going on maternity leave right away.

Now, that question is considered illegal. And he would not have asked it if I were not married. Why? Because an unmarried teacher was not allowed to be pregnant at all.

The latter situation was covered under what were called “morality clauses” in teaching contracts. In these, signing the contract showed the teacher’s agreement to not do anything that was considered immoral by public standards of the time. Immoral behavior could mean becoming a single mother, living with a man she was not married to, drinking or becoming drunk in public, or even public displays of affection. It could mean wearing one’s skirts “too short”, or clothing that was too tight. It could mean being gay, being arrested, taking part in political demonstrations, having an extramarital affair, or talking back to the principal. In short, immorality could mean anything the school board said it meant.

Many teachers learned to live outside the school district, and to be very careful when in public. Nonetheless, I received a reprimand from the Board during my first year as a principal in the 90s. I was painting my office and needed some supply or other. I ran out to WalMart wearing my paint-covered, grubby clothes. This was not, the Board said, the way a principal behaved.

When researching for this blog post, I was surprised but not shocked to find that in many states even today teachers may be dismissed for not conforming to the community’s “morals”.

States (shown in red) with Education Laws that Include Morality Clauses

Dress codes continued to be strict for at least another decade after that embarrassing first interview. Female teachers had to wear skirts or dresses, which meant wearing nylons and “appropriate” footwear. Some places were so strict that I learned to take out three of my five earrings as having multiple ear piercings could be construed as too racy. There was no getting away with other piercings, or visible tattoos. And one could not wear denim except on very special occasions. When I moved to a district that allowed women to wear “dress slacks”, I felt like I’d been given a marvelous gift!

After I got divorced, I could not get insurance for my son through my work. The policy was set up for singles or for families, and a mother and son were not considered a family. Birth control was not paid for through my prescription drug coverage until we entered the 21^st century!

We still have not achieved equal pay for teachers from PK to 12. The gap is closing and is much narrower than when I first began teaching. Back then we were told that elementary children are easy to work with and that to teach high school one needs more education. Even then that argument didn’t hold much water. To the best of my knowledge, we haven’t had elementary teachers who got their teaching license after attending a two year school – the equivalent of an AA. When I first became a principal, I had a couple of elementary teachers who had such degrees, but they were ready to retire. Yes, high school teachers take more in-depth classes in a single subject, but elementary teachers take more classes in more subjects and more in-depth classes in pedagogy. I think anyone would be hard pressed to try to argue one was a more difficult job than the other.

1984 United Federation of Teachers Newspaper Ads Advocating Increased Teacher Pay

Unions have helped a lot to achieve parity between the grade levels!

There is still a lot of difference between the pay principals at each level receive. Women are still under-represented in administration, and because individual principals negotiate their contracts individually, they can still be offered less than a male counterpart. In one district I was told that the brand new elementary principal would be receiving half again as much money as I was making even though I was working with a higher grade level and I had four years of experience. I was told flat out that the difference was that I was a single woman and he had a family to support. I don’t think anyone would be that blatant to say it so blatantly now. At least I hope not.

Despite many advances, women are paid less than men in almost all areas.

Things have changed a lot for women since 1900, and I’ve only been around to see a fraction of those changes. I haven’t even touched on things like women’s suffrage, the laws that finally allowed women to own property in their own right, being allowed to have a credit card in our name, or being allowed to prepare for any career we want. I haven’t mentioned the college professors who brushed women aside saying we were in college only to get our MRS (to get married). I haven’t mentioned the constant struggle women felt when it seemed everything in the world was against us. I’ve only brushed the surface with my little trip through educational changes. I probably forgot a lot more of them!

I didn’t describe how difficult the struggles were to achieve those changes. Just think about it: It took the better part of a century to do this, and it has taken the last 50 years to make most of the changes I’ve described. It would be very easy to lose the gains we’ve made. Think of that when you listen to the news or when your local district negotiates its next contract or when your state contemplates making changes to education law.