What’s in a (First) Name?

One thing I have learned from my most dignified colleagues is that, in a school, first names are not to be thrown around lightly. It was in my fifth year of teaching that this finally struck me as a visceral truth. That was when a colleague called out to me by my first name while on a field trip. My spine crawled. This was not, by the way, the laid-back, after-lunch, early-afternoon portion of the trip. No, this was during the crucial get-everybody-in-line and let-them-know-you’re-serious part that comes at the beginning. But quite apart from this impropriety, what irked me was the fact that Mr. Jellybowl was no friend of mine in any case.

He was not trying to demonstrate any bond of friendship, of course. He was, rather, working with a different set of standards regarding the proper deployment of first names. Presumably, he was following the conventions of contemporary college-corporate nomenclature, which insist that you "call me by my first name." A professor of critical theory and a VP of marketing have this much in common: they are both willing to rob the tropes of friendship and informality in order to further their institutional ends. “My name is Mr. Stickfigure!” I reminded Mr. Jellybowl, sharply, in front of the kids. Back atcha, bastard.

But I will pay any bastard in education the respect of calling him or her Mister or Ms.

I don’t know no Joe or Naomi until we’ve broken bread or at least cut the bologna.

Resources in General and Intellectual Resources in Particular

Resources are the things that a school system uses in order to function. This is a simple definition of resources, yet it is treacherous in its consequences. Resources are not the things we tend to point to and call “resources,” at least not the things themselves. Things are resources only insofar as they contribute to a functioning system. This means that common resources like textbooks, desks and computers may not be resources at all. Not, that is, if they are stashed away in a storage closet, administered by an incompetent facilitator or stolen out from under your nose. This is no more than to say that a thing is only as good as the use to which it is put. If a thing is not being put to good use, whatever it is, it should not be counted among the resources of a school.

It also follows from this idea that a school can be deprived of its resources in at least two different ways. The first is the most obvious, and tends to be the focus of more naïve discussions of school resources. It concerns the literal lack of the things that a school needs to operate—insufficient raw materials to run the system. A school may be just as resource-deprived, however, even with sufficient raw material. If there is no system in place to account for your resources, they are just things you have lying around your school.

At this point, it is time for teachers to do an informal self-assessment. Ask yourself: On a scale of 1 to 10, how would I rate my confidence in the following statements (10 being most confident):

a) I will have sufficient resources for my foreseeable classroom needs.

b) Those resources will be effectively administered, not just in my classroom, but throughout the entire school.

If your confidence interval on either part of the question is below an 8, you work in a resource-deprived school.

If you work in a resource-deprived school, you must learn to compensate for this deprivation. Unfortunately, you can only make up for resources with other resources, and they must come from somewhere. The only dependable place to find them, I would suggest, is in your own head. These are your intellectual resources, and they come before all others. If you could teach your first month of class using only loose-leaf paper and the books on the shelf at home, you could be sure that your intellectual resources were in perfect condition. Until then, there is always something to work on while you wait for them to deliver your laptops, manipulatives, and post-Soviet history textbooks.

More on intellectual resources later.

First Bell at the Brooklyn Educrat

New York City Standards In Education

Standard A1a:
Students will not live in ghettoes.

Discussion Question: Are we meeting the standard?