I’m an English teacher and, obviously, people expect me to be the Tom Brady of punctuation. I'm not, of course-- I'm much more the Bill Murray of metaphor-- but people have expectations. At Thanksgiving dinner this past week, my brother asked me about the lyrics for Bill Withers song “Just the Two of Us” and whether it should be “you and I” or “you and me.”  
​
​“Just the two of us
We can make it if we try
Just the two of us, you and I”

I know the answer to this, luckily—“you and I” is correct. My brother didn’t agree. He wanted me to explain it to him and I, using one of my best teaching techniques, refused. I asked him if he understood the concept of “Nominative Case.” He loved that response so much he stopped talking to me.
 
By the way, that’s a way to end any conversation you don’t want to have. Feel free to borrow it. By the way, sorry about that, Paul.

​Was my intent to shut him down? Hell no. My brother was shut down already. He didn’t want to understand anything—he just wanted a fast answer. And teaching has little to do with fast answers.

I f@#$ing love grammar. I should also say that I know that “none in the accident was hurt” is correct and that “he handed me a beer” is, literally, insane. I also know that my usage of “literally” in the last sentence is inappropriate and overblown—but, let’s be honest, people think that it would be “inappropriate” for a teacher to have a glass of wine in the teachers' lunchroom. I would call it “civilized.”
 
While we’re on it, the word “lunchroom” is a crime against humanity.
 
Teachers aren’t walking Wikipedias and yet, stupidly, that’s the way we are widely seen. In fact, we often see ourselves that way. Good teachers should know stuff and explain it to everyone. We teachers like this role, I think.
 
But that’s jacked up—and it reveals an enormous problem in how we see what great teachers actually do.

​Teachers Explain Things To Me
 
This past summer, I stumbled upon Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant and bestselling book Men Explain Things To Me.  I liked the text so much I’m reading it with my senior communications students this year. Solnit nails the issue of “mansplaining,” a term she used in the Los Angeles Times in 2008 to describe how some men cluelessly tell women “how things are.” We so obviously live in a man’s world—a place where men are encouraged to be successful and confident much more than women. Mansplaining reveals how certain men rarely recognize this fundamental reality and explain things entirely from their own privileged and oblivious point of view.
 
But I don’t believe Solnit’s message is necessarily just about gender. It’s about how a culture of explaining is, inherently, self-deluding. Power creates a sort of blindness in communication. “Explaining” itself is the problem.

As a culture, we misunderstand the purpose of teaching, learning, and school. Most of us believe that school is where we go to acquire content and skill mastery. Anything we can’t learn on our own must be “taught” to us, we believe.  And the way we learn is through explanation.
 
Here’s where teachers come in. Good teachers are good explainers, we think.

There are no bored three year olds.

​They don't exist. Three year olds want to know everything:  they explore the worlds through their eyes, hands, and mouths. Have you ever been around a child in the presence of a strong odor, like fresh cookies or dog poo, or a loud sound, like fireworks or bird chatter? They go off like alarm clocks set for "NOW!"  The five senses are a party. 

​The world is a whirling carousel of interesting things to a child, shimmering with possibility and purpose. Three year olds NEED to know everything.
 
So why don't thirteen year olds?  Or thirty or forty or fifty year olds, for that matter?
 
I don't know. I suspect it has to do with the hidden cost of experience.

​But something happens:  as we grow, these expectations begin to erode our ability to experience something on its own terms. We experience fewer things that surprise us. We are constantly predicting what's going to happen-- and, often, we are right.

Life is scary. Predicting what's going to happen makes it bearable. Sometimes, it's the only difference between safety and danger, anxiety and relaxation.

The Biggest Obstacle Isn't a Reality:  It's a Dream
Here's the old model, the time-tested, incredibly persistent concept of "school:"

The teacher teaches the student.

It's simple, easy to understand, and has the ring of truth.  We say things like "he taught me so much!" or "I learned so much from her." The teacher is a vending machine, a talking textbook, a knowledge dispenser. We keep the wisdom and dole it out.

The Great Teacher Fantasy
Often, teachers of teachers claim to want to debunk this model.  The better part of professional development that I have seen in the last 10 years as a teacher seems to be grounded in the idea that the teacher should not be the "Sage On the Stage."  But I don't believe we actually want to debunk this at all.  When we talk about a great teacher, we often talk about this brilliant genius around whom the classroom orbits. 

This old model IS the problem, of course.  We love the fantasy that teaching is simply imparting wisdom. The best teachers are ones whose kids learn the most from him, we think.  

We live in a "Guru culture." To be a "great teacher," you just have to be a respected resource of knowledge or skills.  Anyone can teach, we think, as long as a person has content mastery.  Are you a great chef? Then you can teach cooking. Are you a professional baseball player?  You'd be a great coach. Are you a great surgeon?  You'd be a great science teacher.  We've even created our computer models around it.  Data is "downloaded" from an original source.  It's "copied." Knowledge is not mastered-- it's copied and pasted.

The ramifications are enormous. We have come to think of teachers as simply "info and skill distributers." Our whole student testing and teacher evaluation model is based on this presumption. Our cultural conversation about teaching isn't based on teaching; it's based on a fantasy of teaching.

What Teachers Actually Do
Student teaches herself.  Teacher teaches student to teach herself.

Our fantasies about being a great teacher hide what great teachers do. Great teachers don't teach anything; they teach learning. First time parents have no teachers. Nobody could teach Mick Jagger how to sing, Warren Buffet how to invest, Oprah Winfrey how to produce, Michael Phelps how to swim, or you how to do whatever it is YOU are good at.  Of course, teachers helped Mick and Warren and Oprah and the rest-- but no one taught them-- at least, not in the traditional sense. They taught themselves. Their mentors/teachers taught them (and you) not WHAT to do but, rather, HOW to do it.  As have all the great teachers in your life.

Heck, you taught yourself language.  How to walk.  Do you ever think about how your brain must worked for that to have happened?  For it to happen to everyone, everywhere, in every culture around the world?  Great teachers know that students HAVE to teach themselves. 

The fantasy model needs a real challenge, especially as our cultural and political conversations about good teaching begin to gain more and more traction. How can we attract great teachers when we don't even talk about what a great teacher does?

When on the job, the best teachers are barely there. They elegantly and efficiently drop in and out of the learning process. Doing this is complicated and requires extraordinary awareness. It's a profession that is all about "how," not "what." 

Great teachers aren't vending machines. They are catalysts, context makers, inspirers, models, and value multipliers.  

It's why I say teaching is like entrepreneurship: it's about engaging others in answering a question or solving a problem. It's why it's the most important profession in the world. Teachers impact every market and every other profession. How we think about teachers impacts everything.

This is not a moral argument. It's an economic one. 

Hello from SXSWedu2016  in Austin. Everyone calls this the best education conference in the country and yet my crystal ball mostly predicts tacos, beer, and bbq.

I'm here with my good friend Josh Timlin and we're looking for seminars that don't suck. You too? 

I'll be posting some of the sessions we'll be attending for the next week-- stuff that looks sexy and yet, sexy, too. And, by that, I mean, "good." I expect it to be a target rich environment.

See the World; See Yourself
Everyone has a style. Each of us has a wardrobe, no matter how casually curated. Even your most fashion-careless friend has a collection.

We all have a point of view.

And while very few of us ever attend a fashion show (let alone fashion week in New York City), we all witness the parade of style around us every day. Again, the most fashionably-tragic people have a sense of this. I know you're probably thinking about your dad, who cynically asserts that he wears the same khakis at least 3 times a week. The man cares about fashion: he just cares about not caring.

And that's the deal. Creating your style is personal. It takes time, experience, and relationships. And, to develop it, you need mentors.

Now take a fashion show like NYMFW.  To be clear, a fashion show is a business convention at its very core. This is New York, baby. It's an arena for scrappers, innovators, and startups. 

But fashion shows are more than a market place-they serve to direct and instruct. Fashion shows reflect and articulate cultural tastes; designers start trends, 
shape trends, and cultivate trends.

Like educators, designers help others create and articulate a point of view. 

Many fashion brands are named after people for a reason. In a world where stadiums, stores, and skyscrapers 
are named after companies, this is worth noting. The fashion industry knows the power of a personal connection. We want to model ourselves after people we admire.

Teachers know this, too. You can remember the style of your favorite teachers-- whether it was way they dressed, talked, or thought about things. Damn, they were cool, right? They didn't teach you WHAT to think; they taught you HOW to think. The point:  we need someone else's point of view to develop our own. 

And that's why Fashion Week is also Teacher Week. It's all just teachers and students, son. And, speaking of school...

Public School, you can make it easy for yourself and just tweet my VIP pass to your show to @mikekleba.  I mean, we should be hanging anyway, you know what I'm saying? #educatorsunite

Teaching science isn’t just a science. It’s an art.

Everybody knows that science and science education are hot these days. The Oscars (and tons of ticket buying audience members) loved this year's nerdpics The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game. Whether it’s on TV (with PBS's Neil deGrasse Tyson or AMC's Breaking Bad) or on YouTube (with Bozeman Science or AsapSCIENCE), science is dope. Science sells-- and the audience is growing.

Like with a startup in any market, whether it be a taco truck or a new app, being hot can turn into success fast- especially in schools. Teachers who know how to gather, focus, and replicate this kind of interest can build a program that can last for years. It's entrepreneurship at its most fundamental.

This is no small feat in a culture always looking to save money by cutting programming in schools. I often read how difficult it is to launch a winning company. 

Try launching a winning (and challenging) program in a school. Especially in the field of science.

THE NEW OIL: GREAT TEACHING
Times are changing in education. Those who work in educational policy-- including some of my good friends-- are deeply involved in the political question about WHO should pay for what. It's an incredibly important and vital question. But I contend we keep skipping the question of WHERE the money should go.

The key to better schools and better education is attracting and maintaining great teachers. 

Exxon’s point appears to be that we mostly need better training for teachers. They're putting some money into doing it, too, which is commendable, even if you don't like rockstar golfers. But is it how we improve schools?

I have a lot of experience in teacher training:  I've been through graduate programs, seminars, professional development, staff meetings... I've seen what people are doing to train us.  It is not good. Every once in a while, you actually learn something in PD.  But most of the time, it is dismal parody of itself. It's bad teaching about good teaching. It'd be funny it weren't so bloody sad or frustrating.

WHERE ARE THE GREAT TEACHERS?
ExxonMobil, along with the US Dept of Ed and countless teacher colleges want to know: how can you train a person into being a GREAT teacher?

My answer is simple: unless the training is amazing, you can’t. And, frankly, most training sucks.

Yes, you can help a lousy teacher become less lousy. With a lot of work and a great culture, you can take a decent teacher and make them pretty good, certainly. Training IS important-- it's simply not AS important as attracting and keeping talent. 

You want people like LeBron James or Phil Mickelson on your team? A workshop once a year is not the ticket. 

The notion that anyone can be trained into being a good teacher is a distraction from the ugliest open secret in education:  we aren't attracting the best people for the job.

So, where are all of the talented teachers?  

Well, some of them are in the classrooms where we need them, thankfully.

But there are many more who aren’t teachers by trade. They have taken their talents to other professions. Hell, some of them are in probably in advertising, coming up with stuff like this for ExxonMobil. They’re making money doing something else.

The bottom line is:  we don’t have a skill problem.  We have a talent problem.  Exxon Mobil, I'm glad you want to help out teachers.  You guys over at your company know how to attract talent, right?  

You have to pay for it. It's not a training problem. Talent is a salary problem. 

Oh, and the Emperor is naked.  Again.

Teachers need Don Draper.

Lost in the hot debate about whether or not preschool helps kids later in life are data-supported findings about the value of great teaching.
 
A 2013 study of early childhood education, funded by the Foundation for Child Development, has produced “too much evidence to ignore,” according to the non-profit, nonpartisan New America Foundation.
 
As a part of that research, psychology professor Deborah Phillips, of Georgetown University, found that her seven month study of early childhood education programs in Tulsa, OK exposed what a “model for the whole country” could look like in education.

Phillips, highlighted in an article on NPR, identifies a handful of factors that lead to a successful preschool. The formula is simple:
 
1.     A well funded program
2.     A low teacher-student ratio 
3.     Qualified, supported, and well paid teachers
 
“The role of the teacher in all of this, researchers say, is the foundation of a high-quality preschool program,” says NPR.