Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 76

Stop complimenting

As an elementary school teacher, I have made it my policy for two decades to avoid commenting on a student’s physical appearance. A student’s appearance should be the last thing of concern to a teacher, but more importantly, these comments, even when positive, can be damaging and hurtful to kids.

This policy has been scoffed at by many of my friends and colleagues. I have been laughed at and criticized for my position. I’ve been told that I am taking things too far. Becoming too politically correct.

Yet I have articulated this position to every class of students over the past two decades, and I have never had a single student scoff or laugh or even question my policy. Every single student has appreciated and supported my position. Some of them have tried to adopt it as well.

It’s only certain adults who think I’m dumb.

A few years ago, just prior to a performance by the school’s choir, I watched a teacher compliment a young man on his appearance. The boy was wearing an impeccable suit and tie, and even his dress shoes gleamed in the dull glow of the hallway’s fluorescent lighting.

The teacher doing the complimenting was aware of my “no commenting on physical appearance” policy. After praising the young man for his appearance, she turned to me and asked how her complimentary words could ever be construed as hurtful to the child.

I pointed out to the teacher that while the young man was probably feeling great about her compliment, the boy to his left and the boy to his right, who were not wearing suits and had not received a similar compliment, and who were perhaps from families who could not afford suits and ties and gleaming dress shoes for their boys, might be feeling very differently as they take the stage.

Therein lies the danger.

As one who grew up in relative poverty, I know how it feels to hear your classmates and friends receive compliments for their appearance while you do not.

Worse, I know how it feels to receive a compensatory compliment from a teacher who suddenly realizes that he or she has probably made you feel lousy while gushing over the appearance of your best friend.

That student in the three-piece suit was also about to perform in a concert. The teacher had an opportunity to compliment the students’ effort, focus, collaborative spirit, or positive attitude. Instead, she complimented him on his physical appearance, thus reinforcing the importance of looking good over so many other more meaningful attributes.

There are simply too many other things worth complimenting for any educator to be discussing physical appearance. Effort, sportsmanship, empathy, helpfulness, rigor, respect, friendship, and charity are just some of the areas in which teachers can easily offer meaningful, productive comments.

Not to mention that a student’s choice of clothing and haircut, especially in elementary school, are often not entirely within the child’s control. Oftentimes a teacher’s compliment about appearance amounts to little more than a comment on how the student’s parent chose to send their child to school, making the words even less meaningful.

So more than two decades ago, I decided to stop commenting on students’ physical appearance, and I have held this line ever since.

It hasn’t been easy.

A girl walks into my class with a new haircut and asks me what I think.

I say, “I don’t know about your hair, but I love the way you use that brain underneath your hair to solve math problems.”

A boy walks into class with a new shirt promoting his favorite basketball team and asks me if I like it.

“I didn’t really notice the jersey,” I say. “But I noticed the way you played kickball yesterday. You were a great sport. Good job.”

Sometimes these exchanges are a little awkward, and sometimes the kids think I’m a little crazy, but I would choose awkward and crazy over the alternative.

In order to counter the furrowed brows and confused stares, I have made it a habit to tell my students about my policy now, and in almost twenty years, I have never had a student disagree with my rationale or debate my decision. In fact, almost every student responds positively to my policy.

Nevertheless, I have been told by many educators and parents that my policy is unrealistic and unnecessary. They typically bolster their arguments with statements like, “My teachers complimented me when I was a kid, and we survived” and “These kids are going to hear compliments for the rest of their lives, so there’s no reason for us to be sheltering them now.”

These types of arguments boil down to nonsense like this:

If it worked for me, it should work for them.

Change is not possible.

One person can’t make a difference.

If it’s going to be bad later, it might as well be bad now.

I like what I do and don’t want to change but have no rational argument to support my position.

But from tiny acorns mighty oaks grow. That means someone needs to be an acorn. As awkward and crazy and divergent as that acorn may seem, someone must take the first stand.

Don’t tell me that my policy is foolish because no one else adheres to it.

Don’t tell me that my policy is useless because everyone else in that child’s life will comment on physical appearance.

Change often begins with a few lone voices, and it turns out that I am not alone.

In a piece entitled  One Hundred Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do, Bruce Buschel writes:

“Do not compliment a guest’s attire or hairdo or makeup. You are insulting someone else.”

This is a man who understands the inherent hazard of a compliment, particularly when it addresses physical appearance.

In a piece entitled How to Talk to Little Girls, Lisa Bloom writes:

“Teaching girls that their appearance is the first thing you notice tells them that looks are more important than anything. It sets them up for dieting at age 5 and foundation at age 11 and boob jobs at 17 and Botox at 23. As our cultural imperative for girls to be hot 24/7 has become the new normal, American women have become increasingly unhappy. What’s missing? A life of meaning, a life of ideas and reading books and being valued for our thoughts and accomplishments.”

Or watched Meaghan Ramsey’s TED Talk “Why thinking you’re ugly is bad for you.” She would agree with my policy wholeheartedly.

In the end, regardless of whether or not you believe that physical appearance should be a matter of discussion with students, there are far too many more important things to comment on during the course of a school day for me to waste an ounce of breath or a second of time on a student’s dress or hairstyle or shoes.

I am too busy on a minute-by-minute basis helping children attain the skills they need to be successful in the future to waste a single moment on the way they look.

Perhaps you are, too.

Soliciting shortcomings and flaws for 2023

Every year since the fall of 2011, I’ve posted an annual list of my flaws and shortcomings online for people to read.

I’m a weirdo. I know.

It was a tradition born initially from spite.

Back in 2011, a reader accused me of being materialistic after I wrote about my lack of a favorite number, specifically criticizing me for saying that when it comes to my salary, my favorite number is the largest number possible.

An entirely logical position to hold and also, I thought, slightly amusing.

My reader was apparently neither logical nor amusing.

After deftly refuting his ridiculous charge of materialism, I acknowledged that I had plenty of other shortcomings and offered to list them to appease my angry reader.

Then I did. I made a list and posted it online.

Then I added to the list when friends suggested I had forgotten a few.

Nice friends. Huh?

Since then, I’ve posted the list every year, adding new flaws and shortcomings as they emerge and occasionally removing items from the list when I improve as a human being.

I post the list in mid-September, so the time to post is approaching again. As I do every year, I invite friends, family members, and readers to suggest flaws and shortcomings that I should consider adding to my list.

Please don’t worry about offending me. People say mean things to me all the time. As someone who has expressed his ideas and opinions online every single day for nearly 20 years and successfully sued Donald Trump in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, I receive a great deal of animosity on a regular basis.

I’ll be fine.

If you have any suggestions, please feel free to send them along.

Just a few crazy people

A couple of weeks ago, while playing golf with Gus, he told me:

“Tell those teachers to ignore the nonsense in the news. The crazy gets the attention, but for every crazy person, there are tens of thousands of good people who don’t want you dead and think you’re doing a great job,”

It turns out he was right.

A Tampa Bay Times analysis of 1,100 complaints lodged against books across 62 Florida school districts covering 99 percent of public school students in the state found that two people alone were responsible for more than 600 of the complaints.

Some of the most frequently targeted titles include those dealing with LGBTQ content like gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as books that touch on racial issues, especially those that cover the history of slavery and racial discrimination in the US.

So just two frightened little bigots were responsible for well over half of all complaints.

A similar study by the American Library Association found that there were 1,269 attempts to ban books in libraries and schools in the United States, the highest number of complaints in the 20-year history of the study and more than double the volume of censorship of the prior year.

But just eleven people were responsible for more than two-thirds of those challenges.

Just six percent of book challengers were responsible for 60 percent of the filings to ban books.

Often these book-banning monsters don’t even have a connection with the school. Only one in five challengers even identified as parents.

Gus was right. The attempts by bigots and cowards to ban books in our country are terrible and disastrous, and these attempts and bans are often covered by the media, and rightfully so. But it’s important to remember that despite the attention these book bannings receive, the vast majority of these problems are being created by a very small number of bigots, idiots, and cowards.

Most people – Democrats, Republicans, independents, and the apolitical – are decent human beings who would never even think of banning a book.

I also like what my friend, Dan Kennedy wrote

“Every kid throughout time has figured this out on their own, but: Read the books they fight to ban, listen to the music they want to destroy, and see the art they try to burn.”

Passing the time

When I was young and waiting for my parents to finish their shopping, I had little to occupy my time unless I remembered to bring a book.

Back in San Fransisco, as Charlie and I waited for Elysha to try on some clothing, we created photos to make it appear that he was being beamed up to an alien spaceship.

No photo editing allowed. Just practical effects performed on the spot.

The future is a wondrous place.

Spousal anger and a missed opportunity

I maintain a list of future projects that I intend to complete someday. Many items are ideas for novels, characters, and plot lines. Also included in this list are ideas for future businesses, ways to surprise Elysha, new hobbies that I want to try, and much more.

I think of it as an expansion list. Either you’re relentlessly expanding your life in small and enormous ways, or you’re trapped in stasis, which sounds very much like death to me.

Included on this list was this item:

“Serve friends doggie treats.”

A Doggie Bakery in my town sells doggie treats that look precisely like human treats. Cookies, cupcakes, and other delicious pastries.

At least there was such a bakery. I found out today that it has gone out of business.

I had initially planned on serving these doggie treats to my friend, Tom, but after careful consideration, I decided that the wrath of his wife, Liz, might be too much to bear. Liz is also my friend, so tricking her husband into eating dog treats seemed far too dangerous.

So I switched my target to my friend and colleague, Cindy, which was crazy at the time and would still be crazy today. She’s definitely more dangerous and frightening than Tom and Liz combined, and she teaches next door to me, giving her ample opportunity to enact her possible revenge whenever she saw fit, but there’s something about an angry spouse that seems a hell of a lot worse than an angry friend.

Angry friends are angry on their own behalf, so their anger is often fleeting and manageable.

Anger today quickly becomes a shared laugh tomorrow.

But a spouse’s anger can last a lifetime. Even worse, it can burn like the heat of a thousand suns. I’ve seen this phenomenon firsthand. Elysha remains angry with people who have done me wrong even though I have forgiven them years or even decades later.

The same holds true for me. I seethe with anger over people who have done my wife wrong, even though she and that person have a perfectly fine relationship today.

Spousal anger, it turns out, can last a lifetime.

Sadly, I didn’t act quickly enough on feeding my friends doggie treats. The idea was on my list for more than a decade, and now the opportunity is lost.

Let this be a lesson, too:

In addition to constantly relentlessly expanding your life, it’s also essential to act quickly. You never know when a door may close on an opportunity forever.

A bigger life is always a better life.

Advice for school administrators at the beginning of the school year

It’s a challenging time to be a teacher.

Coming off three years of teaching in a pandemic, children have enormous social, emotional, and academic needs. Many are struggling with trauma, the effects of prolonged isolation, and grief.

Teachers, too. For many of us, while our friends have been working remotely or in highly mitigated environments, we have spent our days in classrooms filled with children. Masked. Unmasked. Masked in highly unreliable ways. Some vaccinated. Some not.

Added to all of these pressures are the justifiably concerned, exceptionally anxious parents. Heightened emotions. Increased tension. Politicians attempting to make a name for themselves by dictating curriculum, books, and more, even though they don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to be a teacher or, in some cases, a decent human being.

Many of my colleagues have also contracted COVID-19. Many of those infections undoubtedly came from students, since many of our students were and still are contracting COVID-19, too. Some of us have brought this illness home to our families. Many of us have struggled between taking care of our students and caring for our own sick children or children who are unable to access daycare or their own schools because of infections.

It’s all been incredibly, debilitatingly difficult.

It’s also been remarkably, joyfully, endlessly rewarding.

In the face of these unprecedented challenges and sweeping changes, I would like to offer this advice on behalf of my fellow educators as we begin this new school year:

If you are an administrator – principal, superintendent, or anyone else occupying some place other than the classroom – and you have not been a teacher for the past three or four years, please stop talking about what you think constitutes effective teaching and start listening more closely to teachers. The pandemic has changed education – at least for a time – in deep and profound ways. If you’re not in a classroom – and especially if you’re not working in a school – your previous teaching experience is a lot less relevant.

If you are an administrator who hasn’t been in the classroom for a decade or more – especially if you’re not working in a school – please by all means stop talking and start listening to teachers.

If it’s been longer than a decade since you’ve stood before students on a daily basis, you honestly have nothing at all to say. You probably taught in an age before children carried cell phones. Maybe in an age before the internet became as ubiquitous as it is today. You’ve probably never had a class of students with laptops on their desks at all times. You probably didn’t teach during the extreme partisanship that has divided our nation. You may have been teaching in a time before Sandy Hook or Parkland or Uvalde.

If it’s been longer than a decade since you last taught in a classroom on a regular basis, your job is simply to support teachers by constantly and carefully listening to them and working like hell to meet their needs. Your own opinions on teaching are almost certainly irrelevant unless they have come from the people doing the job every day.

Here’s the thing about teachers:

None of us went into this profession because we wanted to get rich.

None of us saw teaching as an easy job.

None of us want to fail.

If a teacher is asking you for a tool, it’s because we know – better than you could ever know – that we need that tool.

When we tell you that the curriculum is atrocious, it’s because we know – far better than you ever could – that the curriculum is atrocious.

If we tell you that an assessment is no good, it’s because we know – better than you ever will – that the assessment is no good.

When we tell you that a policy is not working, it’s not because we are trying to make our lives easier. It’s because your policy sucks.

Plato Karafelis, my very first principal – who served for 25 years in the school where I am now teaching in my 25th year – would often point out in faculty meetings that he had not taught in a classroom for 12 or 15 or 20 years. “How could I possibly pretend to know what your job is like anymore?” he would say. “I need you to tell me what I need to know. Tell me what you need, so I can support you.”

My current principal – bless his heart – approaches the job similarly.

But that type of leadership is hard to find these days. Lots and lots of administrators who once taught in bygone days – pre-pandemic days, pre-digital days, pre-computers in your pocket days, pre-murder in the classroom days, pre-social media days – think they understand the job. They think that their opinions on pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment are relevant in today’s teaching environment. They spout theories, opinions, and policies from ivory towers when they know nothing about the realities of a classroom today.

I was named West Hartford’s Teacher of the Year in 2006 and was a finalist for Connecticut’s Teacher of the Year. If that same 2006 version of me appeared in my classroom today, I would be a tragically ineffective teacher for my students. It would take me at least a year and a lot of work to become highly effective again. The world has fundamentally shifted since my first few years of teaching. If you’ve been teaching in the classroom during that time, you, too, have shifted along with it. You’ve adapted and evolved.

But if you’ve spent your time outside the classroom, in some office or ivory tower, you know very little about classroom instruction anymore. You know lots of other things, I’m sure, and most are probably very important and useful, but if you don’t work with kids, you don’t understand the realities of the classroom in today’s world, and that, more than anything, is what teaching is about.

So in these challenging times, I implore administrators – especially those not working inside schools – to stop thinking that they know anything about what is going on in the classroom and start asking teachers, relentlessly and religiously, what they need to be successful. Ask them all – the compliant ones, the nonconformists, the rookies, the veterans, the pains-in-the-ass, and everyone in between.

Every teacher has a list of what they need to better help students learn. Ask them for their list, and don’t waste their time explaining why the items on their lists are unimportant, too expensive, unrealistic, or not needed.

Stop assuming you know anything and ask them. Listen to them. Act upon their requests whenever possible. When it’s not possible, find a way to make it possible. That is why your job exists.

If you can’t bring yourself to do these things, then just be quiet. Don’t become an obstruction to good teaching. Stay the hell out of our way. Send your emails, push your papers, and answer your calls in your office while those of us in the trenches battle on.

And please don’t make the mistake of thinking this is the opinion of one person. There isn’t a teacher I know who doesn’t feel similarly. But teachers tend not to be boat rockers. Most are rule followers. Even more are people pleasers. They want to make their bosses happy. They don’t want to be perceived as difficult. Most are simply too invested in their students to fight against blind, incompetent administrative buffoonery.

But they all are feeling these pressures. They all want more for their students. They all need more support. They all wish people who have not occupied a classroom for 5 or 10 or 20 years would do a lot less talking and a lot more listening.

It’s not just me. I promise you.

Best of luck in your coming school year, teachers. You deserve nothing but the best.

Patricia (Connelly) Beckius 1943 – 2023

Our neighbor, Pat Beckius, passed away last week at the age of 80. When Elysha and I moved onto our street 15 years ago, Pat and her husband, Ken, welcomed us with open arms, and they have been kind to our family ever since. Pat would often ask me about my publishing and teaching career, and she was always ready with a quick wave and a friendly hello.

Here’s what I’ll remember most about Pat:

On Clara’s second Halloween, which was actually Clara’s third Halloween since she boycotted Halloween at age two because she was also Clara back then, Pat learned that Clara had a peanut allergy. For every Halloween since, Pat ensured that she had an extra special Halloween treat for our kids which was always peanut-free for Clara.

It was a tiny gesture but also an enormous one, too. It always meant so much to Elysha and me, and it meant the world to Clara. Knowing that someone sees your child, knows your child, thinks about your child, and then bends the world ever so slightly to make it a little better for your child is everything that a parent could ask for from anyone in this world.

Pat will be missed, but she will never be forgotten. How incredibly lucky we were to have known her.

Rest in peace, Pat.

Manager vs. Leader

Warren Bennis famously wrote in his book “On Becoming a Leader” that:

“A manager does things right, and leaders do the right thing.”

Boy, do I like this.

Managers do things right.

Leaders do the right thing.

I have worked with managers, and I have worked for leaders.

Give me a leader every damn day.

Clarence Thomas is corrupt, but this is even worse

The Clarence Thomas corruption scandal grows.

Lavish vacations on multimillion-dollar yachts

Private jet travel

A home for his mother

Private school for his son

Entrance into the most rarefied venues in America

Membership in a prestigious club named after rags-to-riches author Horatio Alger

He also brought members of the Horatio Alger club into the Supreme Court chambers after hours for their rituals and ceremonies.

None of it is listed on his legally required financial disclosures until this week, and only after the great ProPublica began its work uncovering this corruption.

Thomas’s former law clerks have also sent tens of thousands of dollars each to his assistant via Venmo, marked as being for Christmas parties, gifts, or other fuzzier things.

It’s all unethical and disgusting. He was already unethical and disgusting in his treatment of Anita Hill and others thirty years ago, but now he’s moved beyond sexual harassment to something entirely different.

But here’s the thing that astounds me the most:

It’s also so pathetic. I can’t imagine allowing others to fund my lifestyle – vacations, travel, club memberships, a home for my mother – simply because they have more money than me.

I have friends decidedly wealthier than me. I’d never expect them to or want them to pay for my vacations with them. Or fund a country club membership. Or fly me on their private jets. Or pay for my children’s schooling.

When you want something, you work for it. You don’t ask for or accept handouts like a little boy.

It’s pathetic.

Clarence Thomas is clearly corrupt. He also concealed and lied about the gifts he’s received and only disclosed some of those gifts after the press exposed his corruption, but he’s also a sad little man who allows his friends, benefactors, and influence peddlers to treat him and his insurrectionist wife like pampered little children.

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be treated like this. I can’t imagine maintaining my dignity and self-respect if I were treated like this.

Being endlessly curious about how a person could stoop so low and not despise himself, I wrote to Thomas today asking him what it’s like to be ferried around the world like a little boy, living above his means, dependent upon the table scraps and handouts of billionaires.

I’ll let you know if he chooses to respond.

Many bookstores in very few days!

During our 11-day trip to the West Coast last month, we visited a total of six bookstores, including three in one day in San Fransisco.

Upon returning to Connecticut, we promptly visited two more.

Yesterday we visited another.

One of the booksellers, in listening to my kids talk about books, said, “You’re like a fictional literary family.”

It’s a lucky thing when a bookstore makes your children just as happy – and perhaps happier – as an amusement park or round of minigolf.

It’s also sometimes, oddly, a little annoying, particularly when you’d like to putt a ball under a musical windmill or ride a roller coaster.

Too much of any good thing can sometimes be too much.