Elizabeth Green’s “Building a Better Teacher” from this week’s New York Times Magazine was forwarded to me by no less than 11 people.  First, let me break the piece down into its basic elements.  Then I will comment.

(1) Lots of schools in America are struggling.

(2) Schools and other reformers have tried doing all kinds of things to fix the schools, but these attempts have pretty much all failed.

(3) EXCEPT that researchers—notably Eric Hanushek from Stanford—have discovered that there is ONE factor that makes a difference: the quality of the teacher.

(4) So teachers are important!  But we don’t know what makes them good and how to make them better.

(5) Unless… Jackpot!  It is all about classroom management.  This is defined as the ability to control a class and focus them on learning.  One man, Doug Lemov, has come up with a book of tricks to master this skill; a skill that is never taught in schools of education. But that anyone can learn by reading his books (or paying for his seminar).

(6) Oh yeah, controlling a classroom isn’t enough—you also have to not teach kids the wrong things.

(7) Not germane, but a Myers-Briggs test here is cited as if it means anything, which is laughable.

It’s amazing to me how outsiders are astounded at things that are so obvious to people inside a given profession.  I imagine that within the field of jazz trombonists there are certain techniques that the best practitioners demonstrate, say, at New Orleans funeral marches, that the average listener knows nothing about.  I guess this is true about classroom management from the perspective of a layman.

Classroom management is the theme that runs through this piece, though Green doesn’t actually use the word itself until you’ve gotten halfway through. Her principal insight is that passion and motivation are unimportant unless you can control the class. She’s right, and the phenomenon is really incredible.  An untrained observer can instantly spot who can control a class and who cannot.  The students pick up on it too—often in the time it takes for the instructor to write his or her name on the blackboard.

On the one hand, I’m glad this piece exists.  Lots of people who work in cubicles and never meet with large groups of people don’t understand a key element of teaching. The dynamics of controlling a huge group of individuals and making them work as a team to accomplish a goal is no easy feat.  Green demonstrates this a bit.  Also good is the fact that Green more or less accepts as a given the fact that quality teaching makes a measurable difference in student outcomes.  It is unbelievable that this obvious truth is considered so controversial that you can’t write about it in the mainstream media without being attacked by a million internet trolls.

On the other hand:  Of course!  The first thing that any teacher learns is that you cannot teach a class until you can control it.  To call this a basic truth doesn’t even express how basic it is.  Every teacher has their own theory on how to control a class.  One old saw is that you should never smile until December. Another teacher once told me that you didn’t really run the show until you had make a kid cry in front of his peers.

Get a teacher started about classroom management and the stories roll like hobos falling out of a drunk tank. Here are some of mine.

One woman at my old school in Washington Heights had her classes dancing on a string to solve complex math problems.  How did this five foot tall blonde from Greenwich Connecticut keep these eighth graders in line?  I asked Francisco, one of her students, and he said “Man… when you get out of line and she looks at you with those demon eyes, you actually think that she’s gonna kill you.”

When I started at that tough middle school, one of my best friends was a teacher in his early thirties with a laid back surfer vibe, long hair and a turquoise necklace hanging from a leather strap always around his neck.  In the teacher’s lounge, he’d be kicking back in the green leather easy chair and reading books like “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”  But one time I was walking in the hall with him and it was like stalking down the corridors of the Death Star with Darth Vader.  Kids would see him and the blood would drain out of their faces.  I never saw him levitate a student and strangle him, but…

I finally saw how he got the tough reputation one time when I was passing his classroom.  He was standing on his desk, surfer hair transformed into a crazy medusan mass flying on end, necklace whipping in the air as he slammed a yard stick into the metal desk over and over again, while pointing at poor Domingo (who looked like he had pissed himself), while screaming “you wanna mess with ME? <slam> Then I’ll mess with YOU! <slam>   I’ll mess with you TODAY, <slam>  TOMORROW, <slam>  next WEEK <slam> , until the DAY <slam>  YOU <slam>  DIE! <slam>  And then I’ll come to the funeral and I will NOT be wearing black.” At this point, the ruler broke in half and my laid back friend picked up the shards and hurled them into the blackboard, causing pieces of the board to fall to the floor and shatter.

The funny thing is that those two teachers were, hands down, the most popular teachers at the school.  Their displays of purple rage were rare, and the result was kids who behaved themselves and learned way faster than most.  And, truth be told, many craved the discipline.  When you come from a troubled home, or just a chaotic home, someone yelling at you means that that person cares enough about you to yell at you.  Both of those teachers yelled and seemed crazy because they worked like crazy to help the kids learn.

As for me, I was never a yeller or a badass.  I never had (and still don’t have) a demeanor that causes students to become incontinent when I raise an eyebrow in their direction.  Machiavelli said it was better to be feared than loved (if you can’t have both), but I’ve always gone for the love.  I try to get the class to do what I want by making it clear to them that if they don’t, it is a disappointment to me and makes me think less of them.  This has always been effective for me, but it was exhausting to do day in and day out. Now that I’m at a selective school for academically advanced kids, classroom management is a breeze, but some people still think you should be a scary presence all the time.

I reject this idea, because one thing I feel certain of is that every teacher needs to come up with a classroom management strategy that fits their personality. I could never be the psychopathic scary yeller—it just wasn’t me.  And those yellers could never lower their dukes and challenge the class by asking them to summon the better angels of their nature as I did.  I always tell new teachers that teaching is an art, and Pollock would not have been right to tell Mondrian to loosen up and stop painting so many squares.

So, in the end, I agree and disagree with Green’s piece.  On the one hand yes, yes, a thousand times yes, good teaching and classroom management are incredibly important.  But I am very skeptical of the efficacy of Lemov’s list of effective classroom management methods.  I do think that management should be taught at schools of education, but each teacher is going to have their own way of interacting with the class.  To use one more tortured metaphor, we can’t all pitch dominating fastballs like Randy Johnson.  Some of us have to be crafty lefties like Tom Glavine.  Some of us even have to throw knuckleballs like Tim Wakefield.  Any attempt to teach classroom management must take into account these different personality types and show each of them their own path to success—even if it requires a stack of yardsticks to snap.