No freshmen for me

In my small school we have 350 or so students. Generally, teachers elect to teach the same class year after year, with an occasional shift. Me? I had taught freshman algebra and a senior elective (combinatorics one term, logic the next) for a bunch of years.

And then I got tired of freshmen. Not like I won’t teach them again.

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Which is what happened at my first school. I saw a program for a new term, and this was now 6 terms in a row loaded with the most difficult grade – ninth – and I announced to my AP, full voice, in a full office – that if I saw a freshman class on my program again I would walk straight out and never come back. No one said a word. No sense of decorum, right? But for the rest of my time there, I never saw a freshman class again.

And my behavior may have been off, but my request wasn’t. Classroom management was a big issue in our school, and the freshmen were the toughest to manage, and I was a newer teacher with particularly problematic management skills. It was unfair to me and a disservice to the kids to have me teach the toughest classes in the building. Most teachers and kids so paired up would race to see who left the school first – the average teacher hung on about two years,  the kids about the same.

In the next few years I sometimes sat in that office where I once announced my displeasure, and when a kid who had done something to get thrown out of class, but not bad enough to go to a dean, came in, I would size them up. And engage them. At first about what they did wrong. And then with some math. But I had a special routine with a freshman. You knew how they looked and how they walked in who they were. Confirmed by the class they got tossed from. Having ascertained that I had a freshman in front of me, I would ask “What grade are you in?” “Ninth”  (I already knew) “Ooph, I hate ninth graders” [grimace] “but as long as you are here, let’s do some work.” And we would.

Occasionally I covered a class with kids who’d had that conversation. I still can hear the audible whispers: “shhh, he hates freshmen.”

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At my new school, first year, there were nothing but freshmen. So I taught them. And decided that the foundation skills in algebra were important. So I taught them the next year and the next and always asked for them and never threatened to leave if I got freshman classes.

But after six years I was tired. Teaching freshmen takes much more energy than teaching seniors.

There are high school habits to be taught, middle school habits to be broken. There are scared kids to be supported, and acting out ones to be reined in. There are raging hormones and crazy emotions.

And there’s bringing the skill levels from fifty middle schools from four boroughs to a more common place. There are habits of writing math, habits of speaking about math to be adjusted and reformed.

So I took a break. And strangely, the most carefully rotated classes in our entire school became freshman algebra. We don’t fight so much about plum classes; although I won’t say not at all. But Algebra rotated reverse seniority, one teacher each year. And now it is coming back at me. Plus I asked for it. It’s time to start teaching the littler kids again.