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Be The Best Teacher In The World

Dave Ramsey recently wrote an article entitled High-Performance Achievement and it's about his training to run of a marathon.

Seth Godin's latest book, "The Dip" (which I'm going to read this summer), he talks about being the best in the world. That term is defined basically as the best in your sphere of influence at doing what you do. My goal as a band director is to be the best band director in my school district. Then my goal is to have the best band at whatever competition we go to. Then my goal is to have the best... and on it goes. One step at a time.

So the question you may be asking is: "What in the world do a financial guy who runs a marathon and a marketing guy have to do with educating children?"

I'm glad you asked! I am convinced that customer service is at the root of education. I am convinced that customer service is at the root of everything that we do. Redefine your world view for a second and see if it works for you.

I look for ideas that can directly or indirectly apply to my job in many places. If all we do is read crusty old educational journals or just talk to other teachers, we miss it. We lose the wonder and newness that we once had with this whole thing.

When the summer rolls around, I will be able to begin working on writing an e-book and put many more updates on this site. This time of year gets so so busy...

Here's Dave's article High-Performance Achievement for you...

"Don't limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, you can achieve." - Mary Kay Ash

Recently I set an intimidating and seemingly unreachable goal for myself - to complete a marathon. Overwhelming? Definitely. Crazy? Probably. Reachable? YES. There was no question of whether I would do it halfway, just doing enough to get by. I was going to give it my all. To do this, I knew I was going to have to change some habits and sacrifice in ways I never had before.

Just a few weeks ago, after months of training, I did it. I completed the Country Music Marathon in Nashville, and you know what? All the sacrifices were worth it. All the people I've talked with agree. The early-morning runs, the loss of sleep, the physical pain, the mental battles... all are worth it in the end. Yes, I achieved my goal and learned a lot about running, but I didn't tell you all that just to say I ran 26.2 miles and got a medal for it.

Here are 3 keys points I took away from my marathon experience. I hope you will take these valuable lessons that I've learned recently and apply them to specific areas in your life - your money, getting out of debt, marriage, parenting, spirituality, you name it.

1. High-Performance Achievement vs. "just getting the job done." You have to go beyond your normal efforts to achieve high performance. You have to sacrifice intentionally. You have to do something different from what you've done before to reach a new level of personal excellence. People who reach a level of high-performance achievement grasp this. That's why they're different. If you want to distinguish yourself from people who are normal and just want to "get the job done," aim high, set clear goals, and give it all you've got.

2. Keep away from negative people. If you're trying to reach a positive goal, what benefit are negative people to you? NONE, so get away from them. Stick to positive influences in your life. It was so great to see people along the course that were cheering and encouraging me to keep going while I was running. There's nothing like encouragement while you're trying to achieve a big goal, is there? It may be tempting to have a "pity party" or jump on the cynical bandwagon, but it won't be worth it in the end. Continuous negativity brings you down, so stay away from it.

3. Visualize achieving your goal. While I was training, I studied the course route over and over. I knew where I would be in the city at every mile marker. I knew where the hills were and where the straight stretches would be. The course wasn't going to surprise me because I visualized myself working toward achieving each small goal along the way. The same goes if you want to get out of debt. If the big goal is to be debt-free in 2 years, that may seem a little overwhelming. That's why it's important to set small goals along the way - paying off your debts smallest to largest. Quick wins will give you momentum to keep working toward the larger goal and help you visualize achieving it as well.

Be sure to talk with those around you who have achieved great goals they set for themselves. Find out what they did to overcome their intimidating obstacles and what they learned throughout the process.

Always aim for your absolute highest and best - "gazelle intensity" is what I call it. Doing anything halfway should not be an option. Extend this kind of intensity and focus into all areas of your life, and you can and will transform your life for the better.

How To Effectively Deal With Important People

If work just isn't seeming to work out for you, maybe you are focusing your attention in the wrong place.

Here is a list of the people in the educational world of your school who should get the most attention.

1. Students
2. Parents
3. Secretaries
4. Assistant Principal(s)
   
5. Principal
6. Counselors
7. Other Teachers In Your Department
   
8. Custodians
9. The Rest Of The Teachers
   

So how do we do this?

Basic Social Skills
Much of what I have learned about social interaction was learned when I was 21 years old and read How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Trent from The Simple Dollar covers 9 social skills to practice here. These are priceless and really should be common sense. But as Dave Ramsey points out frequently, common sense isn't usually all that common.

All of these things should be practiced regularly with all of the people on the list above. Too many teachers forget to do these to their students and the parents of those students.

• Look People In The Eye - Something I have been doing a LOT more lately, but still struggle with
• Smile - Carnegie's advice but so many people fail to do this
  
• Remember As Many Names As You Can - Learn the names of your students! Even if the students don't know your name. Use the names of the secretaries when you call them. Even if they are at another school.
  
• Offer Greeting To Anyone And Everyone - Especially if someone greets you first!
  
• Ask Questions - Questions inspire learning. Answers will also educate you.
  
• If You Don't Know What To Say, Ask Another Question - Don't make up an answer!
  
• Talk About Your Own Mistakes - People like to know they aren't the only ones who don't measure up. Especially from 6th - 9th grades.
  
• Take An Interest In What Is Important To Them - Go to basketball games, choir concerts, one-act plays, etc.
  
• Keep Clean - Both physically and morally
  

Remember Your Priorities
A wise man once said, "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:21). While these words were spoken in an eternal sense, they also can be applied to other aspects of life. If you are truly interested in people, you will focus on them. If you aren't, then no amount of putting on a show will ultimately be effective for long-term personal development. Teachers should be teaching because they love children. Not because we hate doing administrative paperwork or because we want to complain about this or that. This brings us to the next point...

Stay Out Of The Teachers' Lounge (Avoid Gossip)
Teachers' lounges breed gossip and negativity. I only go in there to get the junk out of my mailbox, and even then not every day. There's usually nothing pressing that I have to respond to immediately, and it just adds clutter to my life (although I have learned out how have a permanently clean desk).

Set Up A Blog Or Email List For Parents & Students
I began emailing parents last year about two times a month or so. It does two things directly, as well as having some other residual effects. First, it increases the amount of communication I get from parents. I get less phone calls than before, but much more email. When they know that I am available, they contact me. I even had a parent email me last summer who had just finished her teaching degree, she was asking my advice on whether she should take a job in another town or one here. The second direct result of the emails is that the parents have a better idea of what is going on. I email concert dates, some grading information, etc. While increased email activity can be tiring at times, it is better to put out the fires before the problem rather than after!

Toward the end of last school year, I set up a blog. Every email that I sent out to parents first went to the blog. Feedburner is available so parents can sign up for emails that way. I also included an email address blank on the student information sheets at the beginning of the year in case they couldn't figure out how to subscribe or simply didn't have the time to do it. So the procedure is that I email the information to blogger from school (or post from home since it's blocked at school). I then forward the email that FeedBurner sends me (which is formatted much nicer than the plaintext emails that I send from school). The parents get the information and then begin flooding my email box with replies. And if they delete the email with important information, they can always go to the blog and check it out. It's beautiful!

Recruiting People Into Your Program

As a band director dealing with beginning band, a substantial part of my energy each year is spent on recruiting 5th graders to be in band next year. I have generally done a pretty good job getting kids enrolled in the program, but this year I began to look at it from a marketing standpoint. The results have been incredible.

We still have some more recruiting to go, but we have already increased the enrollment by about 35 from what it was at this point last year, and it looks like it may very well be more than 60 more students next year than we have this year. That's huge. We still have some marketing left to do in the next three weeks, but I want to use this space to sit back and kind of reflect on some of the things that we have done better this year over last year.

While these concepts are delivered from an educational setting, I believe they could very easily translate to marketing. Much as I have begun to translate Seth Godin's concepts from IT and use them in the educational/band world.

We have 8 elementary campuses that all feed into our middle school. It's interesting when we analyze the numbers from the various schools and compare them to the numbers from last year.

I want to focus on one school in particular for now. The enrollment from that school this year is somewhere around 18 students. The projected enrollment for next year is up to 46. Obviously something happened there that was crucial.

Technique

• We went to each of the campuses and talked with every 5th grade class about band.
• We let a lot of the students try the instruments.
• We had fun with them.
• They had fun.
• I let my 6th graders help me completely revamp the brochure that we give the kids.
• It contains basically the same information, but was totally repackaged with larger and cleaner fonts, "Cooler" pictures, and colored paper.
• We're taking our beginner band on an end of the year competition trip.
• My students helped me design a website with information specifically for the 5th graders. I've discovered that kids like different colors and fonts. Computer geeks like order. This is why MySpace drives us crazy!
  

Timing
I ended up going to this one particular school the same week that the counselors from our school came and talked with the students. And the same week they were supposed to fill out their schedule cards for next year. I went to every music class, one each day of the week. I tested the students on instruments outside. As a result, other students got to see us trying the instruments. They got to hear the clarinet squeaks, they got to hear the brass mouthpieces. This gave them both anticipation for when they would have music that week as well as a reminder for those who had already been to music.

Teacher
Another key is that the teacher who was there last year retired. The one who replaced her was telling the students while I was there about how great band is. I can only assume she had been telling them that most of the year and continues to do so, at least from time to time.

4 Tip's For Being Respected

An Alarming Trend
One of the things that I have come to realize is that, by and large, educators have a poor grasp of grammar and spelling. Maybe this is isolated to the United States, but part of me fears that is not the case. Since nearly all of my adult life has been spent in educational circles, I have no first-hand knowledge of other fields. It amazes me how often I get emails from secretaries, teachers, and even administrators which contain a remarkably poor grasp of the English language. The sad part is that it's often not accidental. They reuse the same misspellings throughout the same email, or even repeat them in further correspondence.

But The Problem Is Deeper
I could almost blow it off as technical or typographical difficulties. I really wish that I could do that. I so desperately want to, but I hear bad grammar when they talk. I don't even mean conversationally breaking rules like ending sentences with prepositions or using slang terms ("Y'all hurry up," etc.). It's simply bad word choice such as "Set up straight," "Do that for him and I." Dangling participles, made up words, unnecessary redundancies, double negatives, you name it, I've heard it come from the mouth of a teacher.

But This Isn't English Class!
That's the excuse that my students give me when I correct them in class. My response is always that we speak English in this class, so we might as well speak it correctly. I admit, I was something of a grammar Nazi when I was in high school and it has carried through to this day. I generally am getting better about correcting adults, but it still bothers me.

But The Title Says 4 Tips
You may have noticed that I messed up the title. Obviously that was done on purpose, since the content of the post is about spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The job of a headline is to draw the reader in. If you are here, the headline did its job! So what are the four tips?

1. Write Correctly. If you don't know some grammatical rules, ask your local grammarian, or just look them up online.
   
2. Spell Correctly. If you don't know, look it up. This saves time (and shame) later.
   
3. Don't Trust Spell Check. If it's underlined in red, it's probably wrong. If it's not underlined in red, it's potentially right. But there are no guarantees. This is why it is best to spell correctly in the first place.
   
4. Proofread Before Printing. If you don't have mad language skills, find someone who does, befriend them, and take advantage of their free time. :)
   

[EDITOR'S NOTE]: Seth Godin illustrated this concept in his blog today (4/21/07).

Do you run the risk of becoming successful?

The time from spring break to the end of the school year often seems like a battle between students and teachers to see who is most ready for the summer to begin. One of the teachers I worked with in my first job was fond of saying, "When you look forward to Monday more than Friday, you run the risk of becoming successful." I find this to be true in most anything. Success comes on the heels of both starting well and finishing strongly.

Applied to the teaching profession, I have come to the point where I look forward to the beginning of the school day more than to the end. I look forward to Monday more than to Friday. I look forward to August more than to May. Okay, maybe not entirely. But I do like the possibilities that the fall semester holds. I like that I have nearly unlimited opportunities awaiting me.

During my evenings, I often plan what I am going to accomplish the next day. During my weekends, I often plan what I am going to accomplish in the next week. During vacations, I often plan a large chunk of the semester. During the summer, I plan what I am going to accomplish in the following school year.


Success comes from looking forward. Looking back was the downfall of Lot's wife. Planning ahead also pertains to classroom management, as you can more easily circumvent problems that you foresee coming up. The greater vision you have, the better you will be able to lead people. In the classroom or the boardroom.

Note From Boss To Employees

Here is a great article on Execupundit that every employee should read.